Pavlov Explains Lingerie

I once attended an underwear-themed all-female bridal shower (not bachelorette party; the bachelorette party was yet to come.) By “underwear themed,” I mean that everyone gave the bride-to-be lingerie, and then we all tittered and pretended to be scandalized as she opened the presents.

Clearly I was not drunk enough to enjoy watching a woman show off thong panties to her mother-in-law to-be and other elderly female relatives. (Technically, I wasn’t any drunk.)

I felt rather like an anthropologist who has trekked all the way to some isolated village deep in the bush, where the natives are happily waving chicken cloacas over the bride to-be, and the only explanation you can extract from anyone is that they’re celebrating the marriage, so you end up writing some bullshit about the villagers attempting to transfer the chicken’s fertility to the bride via sympathetic magic and the patriarchal commodification of women’s bodies into their genitalia, except that the lingerie is real and the bit with the cloacas I just made up.

I did one read an anthropology/folklore article arguing that the bullroarer (basically a stick on a string that you swing around to make a whooshing sound,) actually represented anal sex among Aborigines and other folks.

I consulted with my kids, and they claim that underwear is approximately the lamest present ever, (unless you don’t have any underwear, the eldest noted.) And yet, grown people seem to actually like giving and receiving underwear.

Why?

Think about it. When would you even wear any of this stuff? It’s not functional or practical. You wouldn’t wear it in everyday life, because it doesn’t really accomplish the basic point of underwear (covering your butt and keeping your clothes clean. It doesn’t look particularly comfortable. Clearly the point of lingerie is not function, but something to do with sex–but not to be crass, but I’ve generally found that people remove their underpants during sex, not put them on.

The answer is not that these people were just dumb (or sluts, at least not within the usual bounds of American society, although American society is obviously pretty slutty since it is considered socially acceptable to show off one’s thong underwear to one’s elderly relatives.) Everyone involved was probably of above-average intelligence, and quite a lot of work went into this party. It was truly a labor of love (and happiness) by the family and friends of the bride.

Nor can the answer be any typical anthropologist claptrap about sympathetic magic or inducting the bride into the ways of married life, because no one involved is naive enough to think that after living together for years, these two have never had sex. (Which indicates, btw, that we should be wary of such explanations in other cases.)

After a great deal of discussion with people not at the party, I’ve determined that lingerie seems to work like Pavlov’s bell. Your brain, sensibly enough, associates underwear with genitals (and it associates fancy lingerie with the genitals of sexy lingerie models,) and of course you associate genitals with sex.

So you see a tiny pair of underwear, and like a dog salivating after a ringing bell, your reptile brain starts yelling “Sex! Sex!” and so you buy the underwear, even though the underwear isn’t actually going to result in any change in your likelihood of having sex or not.

This is the principle by which a lot of advertising seems to work.

This explains why lingerie exists, but it still doesn’t explain the party. I suppose for now I shall have to remain confused.

A Zombie-Free Uncanny Valley

Maybe the Uncanny Valley has nothing to do with avoiding sick/dead people, maybe nothing to do with anything specifically human-oriented at all, but with plain-ol’ conceptual category violations? Suppose you are trying to divide some class of reality into two discrete categories, like “plants” and “animals” or “poetry” and “prose”. Edge cases that don’t fit neatly into either category may be problematic, annoying, or otherwise troubling. Your brain tries to cram something into Category A, then a new data point comes along, and you switch to cramming it into Category B. Then more data and back to A. Then back to B. This might happen even at a subconscious level, flicking back and forth between two categories you normally assign instinctively, like human and non-human, forcing you to devote brain power to something that’s normally automatic. This is probably stressful for the brain.

In some cases, edge cases may be inconsequential and people may just ignore them; in some cases, though, group membership is important–people seem particularly keen on arguments about peoples’ inclusion in various human groups, hence accusations that people are “posers” or otherwise claiming membership they may not deserve.

Some people may prefer discreet categories more strongly than others, and so be more bothered by edge cases; other people may be more mentally flexible or capable of dealing with a third category labeled “edge cases”. It’s also possible that some people do not bother with discreet categories at all.

It would be interesting to test people’s preference for discreet categories, and then see if this correlates with disgust at humanoid robots or any particular political identities.

It would also be interesting to see if there are ways to equip people with different conceptual paradigms for dealing with data that better accommodate edge cases; a “Core vs. Periphery” approach may be better in some cases than discreet categories, for example.

The Uncanny Valley of Intelligence

So thinking about this IQ-range business, I suspect there is some range where a person is just close enough to sometimes be sometimes in your range, and sometimes out of it, which renders them confusing and therefore annoying. Like, if they concentrate or have studied a particular subject, they can be as good at it–or better–as you are. But on general subjects or when they aren’t particularly concentrating, they say/do (from your POV) a ton of stupid shit. As a result, you have trouble classifying these people as “smart like self” (pretty much everyone believes themselves to be smart,) or “Dumb like not-self”, and our brains probably dislike that confusion.

There is probably also a point below which, as long as the other person isn’t aggressive, we stop trying to fit them into our mental models and just accept them. We might not have great conversations with them, but we also don’t try to discuss quantum with them. Kids are like this; objectively speaking, kids are pretty dumb and we fall all over ourselves when they do something like add 5+6 without fucking up, but teenagers with their “I think I know everything” attitude really piss people off, even thought teens actually do know a lot more than little kids. I don’t think it’s just because people have an evolutionary reason to bond with their own kids, because teenagers are your kids, too, and people probably find their own teenagers more annoying than other people’s kids.

So among my near-relatives, one of them has a condition that affects their brain/cognition, and I just accept them as kinda dumb and don’t stress about it. Another seems to fall into the uncanny valley of dumb and smart, which I find really stressful to be around. (Oh really, you read a study? And you are telling me about it? And oh, yes, you misunderstood the implications. Again. I see. Yes do please keep telling me about it.) Sadly, the just-dumb relative seems to fall in the annoying relative’s uncanny valley, so annoying relative complains to me about how annoying the just-dumb relative is to them.

Intellectual Fluidity

Ruminating on (someone else’s) theory that people can effectively communicate/bond with others who are within about 20 IQ pts of themselves. I’m not sure how 20 was determined, nor would I expect any particular # to hold for everyone, but let’s just run with the general idea.

One of the implications (which is rather obvious anyway, but I like imagining it so I’m sharing it) is that intelligence, like a liquid sloshing around in your brain, may be applied more or less to different problems. We normally call this “concentrating,” but we can also think about it on a long-term basis as getting really good at something through lots of practice.

The amount of liquid sloshing around may be basically fixed, esp. by adulthood, (or slowly decreasing as you age, fuckfuckfuck,) such that given a variety of tasks and normal circumstances, you perform however is normal for you. But given incentive, you can divert mental energies away from their normal tasks to understand or do something harder than normal; this caries a certain cost, as it makes doing other things more difficult, but you can do it. This allows people to communicate with a variety of others, smarter or dumber than themselves, but not infinitely; since the fluid is limited, you have only so much to devote.

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One of the implications of this theory is that some people have a much easier time making friends/communicating than others. An average person, IQ 100, can effectively befriend people from 80-120, which constitutes the majority of the population. Someone with a 140 IQ, by contrast, can only effectively befriend people between 120 and 160, a very small % of the population.

A reasonable critique is that this may just be excuse-making on the part of people who are bad at socializing and have over-inflated views of themselves. And I am sure this is sometimes the case. But I also suspect there is something to the theory. Speaking as someone who is probably reasonably intelligent, I know that I don’t really fit in with or make friends with normal people. Not out of any sort of malice or purposeful dislike; not because I sit around thinking about how terrible and beneath me those other people are (intelligence is generally only something that occurs to me in retrospect). If anything, I’ve devoted a fair amount of energy to developing normal socializing skills, like looking at faces and asking questions and making conversation on normal topics. But this does not make these conversations interesting. It is generally with disappointment that I realize that someone who I thought might be interesting uses a lot of bad logic and has a bunch of bad ideas that are entirely predictable based on their class/age/tribal affiliations.

But I don’t think I am just a disagreeable jerkface; there are a few people whom I like quite a bit (actually, I think I generally like people better than they like me; my spouse says I am too optimistic about people I meet.) I feel fairly comfortable on blogs devoted to science and reason, and generally in communities that tend to attract fairly high-IQ people.

Autism Exists Because Math is a Recently Evolved Ability

This is a theory.

We know mathematics is a recently evolved ability–all human groups can talk and compose stories, (even groups without written language,) but many groups do not even have words for numbers over three.

Out of the 200,000 years or so that anatomically modern humans have been around, no one bothered to invent written numbers until about 6,000 years ago; algebra didn’t really take off until about 1,000 years ago; calculus was invented about 400 years ago.

The ability to do any kind of abstract mathematics beyond the four basic operations is most likely a very newly acquired human skill–selection for higher math ability would have been virtually impossible prior to the invention of math, after all.

The thing about newly acquired skills is that evolution tends not to have worked out all of the kinks, yet. Things your ancestors have done consistently (including your parents) for the last 100,000 years will probably involve some decent genetic code. Things your ancestors did for millions of years will involve even better code. Things humans have been doing for only 400 years will probably involve some very kludgey code that might have some shitty side effects. Avoiding malaria comes immediately to mind–sickle cell anemia might help you avoid malaria, but it’s a pretty crappy adaptation overall. By contrast, animals have had circulatory systems for a long time; the code that builds circulatory systems is pretty solid.

Since math is a recently acquired skill, we’d expect at least some of the genes that makes people better at math to be a little, well, wonky.

It is probably no coincidence that people with extremely high math abilities have a reputation for being total weirdos, while people with very high verbal abilities–say, published authors–are regarded as pretty normal.

There are a few obvious ways to make people better at a particular task. You could take some neural real estate away from other tasks and assign it to the one you want. We know we can do this “environmentally,” (Phantom Limb Syndrome appears to be caused by the missing limb’s brain area being re-purposed for other tasks, such that when you do those other tasks, your brain simultaneously registers the activity as information coming from the limb); it seems reasonable that some sort of coding could do it genetically. Alternatively, you could increase neural speed or density or something. Or perhaps the overall size of the brain.

Each of these possibilities could also have some negative side effects–bigger brains kill mothers; re-purposing mental real estate could leave you unable to do some other function, like fine-motor control or talking.

Autism appears to basically do some set of these things (it seems to increase neural density, at least.) People with a small amount of autistic traits end up better at math than they would be otherwise. People with too many, though, suffer negative side effects–like struggling with verbal tasks. (It’s no particular surprise that autistic people tend to come from families with high math ability.) Autism is probably another mental trait that makes sense in a Sickle Cell Anemia sense.

Twilight Effects?

So, has anyone documented any negative social effects due to the Twilight books?

It has now been several (or more) years since Twilight was a massively super-popular book (and movie) phenomenon beloved by millions of teen (and older) girls. It has also been a while since I heard anyone vociferously extolling the evils of Twilight and how the books are going to lead teen (and older) girls astray, resulting in abusive, fucked-up relationships.

Of course, in the meanwhile, 50 Shades of Grey came out. It sold well, though doesn’t seem to have been quite so actually popular as Twilight. Perhaps because it’s not as good; perhaps because people don’t want to talk publicly about having read it.

Disclaimer: I have read neither Twilight nor 50 SoG, but I did read the first page of 50 SoG. I thought it was remarkably bad. So bad, in fact, that it makes me despair deep down in my soul.

Anyway. My opinions on the books are irrelevant.

At their heights, people predicted that these books would result in a lot of Bad Stuff, especially bad relationship stuff.

Now that the relevant cohort of women has had several years to date other people, have we actually observed any upswing of Bad Relationship Stuff?

Seems like a great opportunity for someone to really test their theories.

Sickle Cell Anemia Metaphor for Depression

Depression and suicide have non-immediately obvious distributions–countries with things like low crime rates, social equality, and plenty of food tend to have really high rates, while poor, violent countries seem to be quite happy.

Latin American countries, for example, score quite high on happiness surveys, despite being some of the world’s most violent places.

By contrast, the Japanese and Scandinavians have some of the world’s highest rates of suicide.

When something doesn’t make sense, try inverting it: Why might it be useful to be depressed?

I posit that in societies where delaying gratification, working hard, and tolerating high densities of people without getting into fights are prerequisites to reproducing (which has historically been true of China, Japan, and the West,) mild to sub-clinical levels of depression helped people succeed.

(Remember, the phenomenon of most orphans and illegitimate children surviving infancy is only about a hundred years old. Historically, these children almost all died.)

This is where I draw an analogy to Sickle Cell Anemia. With SCA, No SC chromosome = you get malaria. One SC chromosome = you’re not as healthy, but you’re protected against malaria. Two SC chromosomes = you die.

With depression, No Depression => Fun, risky behaviors => you never get a farm and die without any surviving offspring. One Depression trait => you’re not quite sure about this “fun” business => work hard, get a farm, and have children. Two Depression traits => Suicide.

(Obviously depression need not be caused by a mere one or two genes for the idea to hold.)
Seems like the question for Utilitarians becomes, “Is there a way to make people productive, non-violent, and happy, all at the same time?”

Guilt is a Thing inside of You

Guilt does not care whether you deserve to feel guilty or not. It does not care about right and wrong. Guilt is just an evolved mechanism to make you feel like shit if you threaten the stability of your own place in the social order. Guilt forces you to forget everything and grovel on your hands and knees until you are accepted back into your clan, not because your clan is good or right or just, but because outside the clan lies nothing–wilderness, lions, and death.

Little White Lies and What They Mean

Back on my post about society lying, I mentioned a category of untruth that we might generally consider “little white lies”.

In our society, these lies are generally feel-good statements, like, “everyone is beautiful,” or “don’t care what others think–be yourself!” If you believe these things too literally, you’ll get in a lot of trouble, because reality doesn’t work that way. But if you try to point out that these are lies, you’ll meet a lot of resistance–people are very committed to their lies. Sometimes large chunks of their identities or interaction with the world rest on these sorts of lies.

So what’s up with that?

I mentioned in the previous post that I was over-simplifying, and I am. You see, I have only explored the situation so far from the POV of someone like me–someone who takes things literally and prefers factual analyses over emotional ones.

Most people aren’t like me.

Most people, (as far as I can tell,) do most of their functional thinking via their emotions, and use words not in precise ways to convey actual facts about the world, but wield them like the blobs of paint in an impressionist painting to convey the emotions they feel on a subject.

Confusing one approach for the other leads to great miscommunication. The facts-and-numbers person misunderstands the feelings-person, and starts rambling off about a bunch of irrelevant fact-things that the feelings-person either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about. The only thing that is clear to the feelings-person is that the facts-person is a humorless jerk who keeps saying their feelings are wrong. The only thing clear to the facts-person is that the feelings-person makes no damn sense because they keep saying stuff that is wrong.

Let’s use the Trolley Problem as an example. Suppose a trolley is about to kill a bunch of children who have accidentally wandered onto a railroad track, but you could save them by pushing another person in front of the trolley. You know the problem.

Present this problem to a feelings-person, and imagining trolleys killing children will make them unhappy and sad and the alternative of murdering someone will also make them unhappy and sad. The feelings-person concludes that you must be a terrible person because you asked them this question that made them feel so terrible. What kind of monstrous person goes around thinking about trolleys murdering children?

The facts-person, meanwhile, has gotten totally annoyed at the feelings-person for not answering the hypothetical and turning this nice, reasonable discussion of utilitarian calculi into a flame war about their totally irrelevant feelings.

So when dealing with feeling-people, the important thing to remember is to try to understand what they mean, rather than what they say. When a feelings-person says, “Be yourself!” what they actually mean is, “I think society should be generally more accepting of certain forms of quirky and essentially harmless variation, and people should be generally less concerned with what others think. I pledge not to be too judgmental of people who are a little different in ways that aren’t too weird or disruptive, and may myself be a little quirky.” This is a fine message; you just have to understand that this is what “be yourself!” actually means, and not mistake it for actually encouraging you to go to work naked (or whatever you would do if there were nothing stopping you.)

(Likewise, feeling-people, when dealing with facts-people, they aren’t trying to be kill-joys. They just require a lot of tolerance and clarity.)

It’s all or Nothin’

I posit that it is difficult for humans to adequately respond to things that they regard as merely somewhat problematic. Getting just about anything done requires a ton more work than sitting around doing nothing, so people who are motivated to change things are generally people who are convinced that things are really, really bad.

If you don’t think things are really, really bad, you’ll probably end up self-justifying that things are really good, so you don’t need to spend a bunch of time trying to change them, so you can comfortably hang out and relax.

If you do want to change things, you’ll probably have to spend a lot of time convincing yourself that things are truly dire in order to keep up the emotional energy necessary to get the work done.

Either way, you’re probably lying to yourself (or others), but I’m not sure if humans are really capable of saying, “this system is mostly good and mostly beneficial to the people in it, but it has really bad effects on a few people.”

Your opinions about a system are probably going to be particularly skewed one way or another if you have no direct or second-hand experience with that system, because you’re most likely hearing reports from people who care enough to put in the effort to talk about their systems.

Likewise, the people who care the most about political issues tend to have more extreme views; moderates tend not to be terribly vocal.

It makes an impassioned defense of moderatism kind of anomalous.

A good example of this effect is religion. If you’ve ever listened to American atheists talk about religion, you’ve probably gotten the impression that, as far as they’re concerned, religion is super duper evil.

By contrast, if you’ve ever talked to a religious person, you know they tend to think religion is totally awesome.

About 80% of Americans claim to be religious (though in typical me-fashion, I suspect some of them are lying because how could so many people possibly be religious?) We’ll call that 75%, because some people are just going along with the crowd. Since religion is voluntary and most religious people seem to like their religions, we’ll conclude that religion is more or less a positive in 75% of people’s lives.

Only about 40% of people actually attend religious services weekly–we’ll call these our devoted, hard-core believers. These people tend to really love their religion, though even non-attenders can get some sort of comfort out of their beliefs.

It’s difficult to determine exactly what % of Americans believe in particular forms of Christianity, but about 30% profess to be some form of “Evangelical”; Fundamentalists are a much smaller but often overlapping %, probably somewhere between 10 and 25%.

So let’s just stick with “about 75% like their religion, and about 40% have some beliefs that may be really problematic for other people” (after all, it’s not Unitarians and Neo-Pagans people are complaining about.)

For what % of people is religion really problematic? LGBT folks have it hard due to some popular religious beliefs–we can estimate them at 5%, according to the Wikipedia.

People who need or want abortions are another big category. Estimates vary, but let’s go with 1/3 of women being interested in abortion at some point in their lives, with I think 12% citing health reasons. 33 is a pretty big %, but since abortion is currently basically legal, religion is currently more of a potential problem than a real problem for most of these women.

A third category is non-Christians who face discrimination in various aspects of life, and kids/teens who have to put up with super-controlling parents. I have no idea what the stats are on them, but the logic of encounters suggests that the 30% or so of non-Christians are going to have trouble with the 40% or so of problematic-belief-Christians, mediated by non-Christians being concentrated in certain parts of the country, so lets go with 15% of people having significant issues at some point, though these are unlikely to be life-long issues (and some % of these people overlap with the previous two groups.)

So, let’s say 70% like religion; 40% have problematic beliefs; 20% suffer some sort of discrimination in their lives, and about 5% suffer significantly.

In short, most of the time, religion is actually a really positive thing for the vast majority of people, and a really bad thing for a small % of people.

But most people who have an interest in religion don’t say, “Religion is basically good but occasionally bad.” Most people say, either, “Religion is totally awesome,” or “Religion totally sucks.” And that has a lot to do with whether you and your friends are primarily people for whom it is good or bad. The moderate position gets lost.