Tag: science

Behavioral scaling and immigration

From Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E.O. Wilson

The availability and quality of food can also move groups along behavioral scales. Well-fed honeybee colonies are very tolerant of intruding workers from nearby hives, letting them penetrate the nest and even take supplies. But when the same colonies are allowed to go without food for several days, they attack every intruder at the nest entrance. In general, primates also become increasingly intolerant of strangers and aggressive toward other group members during times of food shortages.

I tend to doubt it is a coincidence that this unprecedented and uncharacteristic openness to immigration and disregard for national borders is entirely unrelated to the fact that the West is fatter and more overfed than ever before in human history.

With societies, as with individuals, lean is mean, hard, and dangerous. Fat is soft, weak, and defenseless.

More science fraud at NOAA

Weather science is increasingly little more than historical fiction.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has yet again been caught exaggerating  ‘global warming’ by fiddling with the raw temperature data.
This time, that data concerns the recent record-breaking cold across the northeastern U.S. which NOAA is trying to erase from history.

If you believe NOAA’s charts, there was nothing particularly unusual about this winter’s cold weather which caused sharks to freeze in the ocean and iguanas to drop out of trees….

You’d never guess from it that those regions had just experienced record-breaking cold, would you?

That’s because, as Paul Homewood has discovered, NOAA has been cooking the books. Yet again – presumably for reasons more to do with ideology than meteorology – NOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were.

We’re not talking fractions of a degree, here. The adjustments amount to a whopping 3.1 degrees F. This takes us well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda.

Homewood first smelt a rat when he examined the New York data sets.

He was particularly puzzled at NOAA’s treatment of the especially cold winter that ravaged New York in 2013/14.

It seems we need a fourth neologism…

The real revenge of the nerds

Sexual harassment is what happens when a Gamma finally makes good in life:

Research over decades on thousands of men shows that those who harass or assault women often have a combination of two distinct sets of personality characteristics, and that these then become amplified by power, says Neil Malamuth, a professor of psychology and communication at the University of California, Los Angeles. Psychologists call these “hostile masculinity” and “impersonal sexuality.”

Men with “hostile masculinity” find power over women to be a sexual turn-on. They feel anger at being rejected by a woman. This is something that researchers believe probably happened to them a lot when they were young. They justify their aggression and are often narcissists.

Men with “impersonal sexuality” prefer sex without intimacy or a close connection, which often leads them to seek promiscuous sex or multiple partners. Often, but not always, this type of person has had a difficult home environment as a child, with abuse or violence, or they had some anti-social tendencies as adolescents….

“It’s not automatic; it’s not that power corrupts,” says UCLA’s Dr. Malamuth. “It’s a certain type of man who uses his power in this way.”

Dr. Malamuth says he has new, unpublished research that shows that men who are aggressive toward women are more likely to look for or create a situation where women are more vulnerable. So it’s no coincidence that they are the ones who seek out power—especially over young, beautiful women, who were the ones who tended to reject them when they were young. Then their natural aggression makes them more likely to achieve it.

“The bad behavior is a defense against being powerless,” says Dr. Kilmartin, of University of Mary Washington.

Narcissism, anger, frequent rejection by women, difficult childhoods, and anti-social tendencies. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The social scientists are still trying to spin this and blame it on more conservative and traditional men, of course.

Men who harass or assault women also tend to have sexist attitudes, such as an opposition to gender equality or a favoring of traditional roles for women, says John Pryor, a distinguished professor of psychology emeritus at Illinois State University.

But as we’ve seen, this simply isn’t true. Again and again and again, we’re seeing that the pattern of sexual harassment is based on male socio-sexuality, not ideology. The combination of childhood trauma, unattractiveness, low social rank, and intelligence with later-in-life success that provides power over others is a severely toxic one. Sexual harassment is what the actual revenge of the nerds looks like. Remember that even in the movie of that name, the gamma nerd “who thinks about sex all the time” seduces the cheerleader under the false pretense of being a literal Alpha.

Gammas never handle power well, whether they become the head of state, the head of a film studio, or just the manager of the sales department.

Plague for profit

All right, so this Blind Item at Crazy Days and Nights sounds way too far-fetched to be true; it’s more akin to a SF-horror novel plot than actual news, right?

Apparently The Church is finding it more difficult to bring in children the way they have in the past. That elusive head of the Church has donated tens of millions of dollars to research against diseases, many of which adversely affect third world countries. It was during this process of trying to eradicate a disease that one of the scientists created a pathogen which can kill swiftly and effectively. When the head of The Church heard about it, he agreed to test it on a village in a country that was friendly to bribes. It worked really well. It killed an astonishing number of people which were mainly adults. The children of the adults were 30-40 miles distant at a boarding school. Now, with no parents, they needed to be adopted. The Church, along with more bribes to the government had a great way to get large numbers of children quickly.

With that success, they decided to try it again, but this time, the villagers didn’t stay in place as they had before and some traveled to a neighboring village. The next thing you know, it has now started spreading to different countries and killing people faster than they can create cover stories. Look for them to spread the rumor it is an Ebola outbreak to give themselves a chance to destroy the evidence of what they did.

It wouldn’t shock me if they come forward with a cure and make hundreds of millions of dollars. That might bring too much publicity for them though. Even they would have tough time watching thousands of people die though wouldn’t they?

I mean, lethal artificial diseases that are being tested in third world countries is just crazy conspiracy theory, right? Right?

Fears are growing of a major health crisis in East Africa as a girl died of a suspected fever which could be more deadly than the Black Death. A nine-year-old girl died in central Uganda with the symptoms of an eye-bleeding disease which it is thought could kill up to 40 per cent of those infected by it.

The feared outbreak comes only months after hundreds of people were killed by the plague in Madagascar in what was described as the worst bout for 50 years. The symptoms of the new disease include headaches, bleeding, vomiting, diarrhoea and muscle pains.

This timeline just keeps getting weirder. If the Vikings win the Super Bowl, we’ll know all bets are officially off and literally anything can happen.

Narcissist vs psychopath

Anonymous Conservative explains how similar behaviors stem from very different sources:

My view of the Narcissist is their amygdala is too painful when triggered, and their brain is not able to handle the stimulation of it. The narcissists I have observed would actually see their brains melt down when triggered, and it would manifest in what looked like incredibly unpleasant physical symptoms, almost combining a seizure, and the gastrointestinal upset and sickness of a major illness.

The psychopath is the opposite. Their amygdala is not there, so they don’t really feel fear. I am reminded of the character Hannibal Lector in the book Hannibal. At a critical moment, man-eating hogs are released, and rush toward Hannibal, who is holding FBI agent Clarice Starling in his arms. But the pigs move around Hannibal, because he feels no fear, and the pigs detect it. Although the scene is fictional, that is how psychopath brains operate.

Now narcissists, out of necessity, eventually hack their brains by using a false reality to shut off that amygdala-pain. They develop the ability to force their brain to believe something untrue, just so their amygdalae will feel relief and their amygdala will not turn on. I am quite certain it begins in childhood. As children however, I am not sure if they force themselves to believe an untruth, and that eventually becomes more more common as their brain finds it relieves angst, or if the untruth, when contemplated, is so relieving their brain cannot tell it from the truth. From their amygdala’s perspective, that would feel the same as when we find believing a falsehood irritating, and as a result we seek relief when we default to truth.

But once a narcissist develops this hack, now their amygdala’s influence on the brain and behavior is very similar to how a psychopath’s amygdala influences the brain and behavior. It is as if the amygdala is not there. The psychopath just feels nothing, while the narcissist alters their beliefs until they feel nothing.

Interestingly enough, he concludes that narcissists are more dangerous than psychopaths, because psychopaths are too clueless to be able to conceal themselves or their deeds very effectively.

Genetically inferior

More scientific evidence in support of my original hypothesis that atheism is a form of mental abnormality that results in spiritual insensitivity is accumulating:

Left-handed people are more likely to be atheists, a study has found, as it says belief is passed on genetically.  The study suggests that religious people have fewer genetic mutations and are therefore less likely to be left handed or have conditions such as autism or schizophrenia.

British academic Edward Dutton, a professor at Oulu University, Finland, said that in pre-industrial times religiosity was passed on like other genetic attributes because it was associated with greater stability, mental health and better social behaviour. But modern science means many people who would not previously have survived are making it to adulthood and reproducing – leading to a greater incidence of atheism.

Lack of belief in God is connected to genetic mutations which cause attributes such as left-handedness or autism, the paper argues.

This would also put Bruce Charlton’s Mouse Utopia observations into context, as atheism appears to be one aspect of the nihilistic despair that is a consequence of the increased prevalence of genetic inferiority that results from easier circumstances.

The Roman invasion of Britain

Caesar’s invasion site is believed to have been found:

The first Roman invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar in 55BC is a historical fact, with vivid accounts passed down by Tacitus, Cicero and Caesar himself. Yet, despite a huge landing force of legionaries from 800 ships, no archaeological evidence for the attack or any physical remains of encampments have ever been found.

But now a chance excavation carried out ahead of a road building project in Kent has uncovered what is thought to be the first solid proof for the invasion. Archaeologists from the University of Leicester and Kent County Council have found a defensive ditch and javelin spear at Ebbsfleet, a hamlet on the Isle of Thanet. The shape of the ditch at Ebbsfleet, is similar to Roman defences at Alésia in France, where a decisive battle in the Gallic War took place in 52 BC.

Experts also discovered that nearby Pegwell Bay is one of the only bays in the vicinity which could have provided harbour for such a huge fleet of ships. And its topography echoes Caesar’s own observations of the landing site.

Dr Andrew Fitzpatrick, Research Associate from the University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History said: “Caesar describes how the ships were left at anchor at an even and open shore and how they were damaged by a great storm. This description is consistent with Pegwell Bay, which today is the largest bay on the east Kent coast and is open and flat.

“The bay is big enough for the whole Roman army to have landed in the single day that Caesar describes. The 800 ships, even if they landed in waves, would still have needed a landing front 1-2 km wide. Caesar also describes how the Britons had assembled to oppose the landing but, taken aback by the size of the fleet, they concealed themselves on the higher ground. This is consistent with the higher ground of the Isle of Thanet around Ramsgate.”

Thanet has never been considered as a possible landing site before because it was separated from the mainland until the Middle Ages by the Wanstum Channel. Most historians had speculated that the landing happened at Deal, which lies to the south of Pegwell Bay.

This is, of course, absolutely fascinating in its own right. It would be intriguing to compare the layout of the land with the historical descriptions. But it is also an important lesson in the difference between history and archeology, and how there is very little physical evidence of many events that are widely accepted as having taken place.

Science is simply not a viable metric for the past, due to the intrinsic limits of scientody.

Not a good start

After reading Tom Wolfe’s unstinting praise of EO Wilson, I decided I need to read the man’s work. Who could fail to be interested after this sort of billing?

He could be stuck anywhere on God’s green earth and he would always be the smartest person in his class. That remained true after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in biology from the University of Alabama and became a doctoral candidate and then a teacher of biology at Harvard for the next half century. He remained the best in his class every inch of the way. Seething Harvard savant after seething Harvard savant, including one Nobel laureate, has seen his reputation eclipsed by this terribly reserved, terribly polite Alabamian, Edward O. Wilson.

Fantastic. But as I am insufficiently learned to read his scientific work critically, I elected to begin with his philosophical work, specifically, The Meaning of Human Existence. And I was unexpectedly disappointed on only the second page. To say that it does not begin well for a man of supposedly superlative intelligence would be an understatement.

In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.

There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the Universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events. During organic evolution, for example, the origin of one adaptation by natural selection makes the origin of certain other adaptations more likely. This concept of meaning, insofar as it illuminates humanity and the rest of life, is the worldview of science.

What? All right, hold on just one sociobiologically-constructed minute. No one, literally no one, ever uses the word “meaning” that way. Even less so can this usage be excused in the case of an author who is writing in the intrinsically philosophical context of attempting to explain the significance of Man’s existence. Let’s reference the dictionary.

MEANING, noun

  1. what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated; signification; import
  2. the end, purpose, or significance of something

Hmmm. He has at least a superficial excuse. It appears that Wilson is playing a little fast-and-loose with the definition of “meaning” here. He is clearly using it in the sense of “what actually is”. That is (unexpectedly) fair enough, except for the fact that by selecting that specific meaning of the word,(1) he reduces both his statement and the thesis of his book to basic tautologies.

Consider the title: The Meaning of Human Existence. Now let’s incorporate this second, broader way the word meaning is used, according to Wilson: The Actual Is of Human Existence. What, one wonders, can we derive from Wilson’s bold statement that humans actually exist? Are we to assume it is a catalog of facts about humanity rather than a statement about the significance of humanity’s existence? It’s more akin to a bad comedy routine than a genuine philosophical statement.

“What do you mean by that?”
“What it is. What it actually is.”
“I know what you said. But what do you mean?“
“What I said. What else could I mean?”
“Don’t you mean what else could I actually is?”
“Don’t you?”

In fact, I even suspect Wilson of cherry-picking this definition in order to beg the question he appears to be feigning to propose given the fact that it does not appear in other dictionaries, such as the Oxford online dictionary.

MEANING, noun

  1. What is meant by a word, text, concept, or action.
  2. Implied or explicit significance.
  3. Important or worthwhile quality; purpose.

But the definition provided is even worse than the self-parody it appears to be. Remember, Wilson didn’t directly state that meaning is that which actually is, he declared the second way the word is used to be is that the accidents of history “are the source of meaning”. So, he’s actually using the word meaning in his own definition of the word meaning. This is either intellectual incompetence or intellectual shadiness, and while I cannot say which is the case yet, I am now on high alert to the probability of either… or both.

Given this shaky – or shady – foundation, I do not have very high hopes for the philosophy that Mr. Wilson has constructed upon it. I completely understand why some find my intellectual arrogance to be unseemly and offputting, but honestly, can you not in turn understand how I come by it, given how often this sort of thing happens?


(1) One can legitimately groan at that one. It does nicely underline my point, though.

The handicap of high IQ

This recent finding on intelligence and leadership will not surprise anyone at this blog:

Although intelligence is positively correlated with inspiring and capable leadership, there’s a point where a leader’s IQ offers diminishing returns or can actually lead to detrimental leadership.

The findings were made by psychologists at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, who assessed 379 mid-level leaders employed by private companies in 30 mainly European countries. The average age of the participants was 38 and 27 percent of them were women.

Each participant was asked to complete the Wonderlic Personnel Test, a cognitive ability test widely used by employers and educational institutions around the world. The average IQ of the participants was 111, which is well above the average IQ score of 100 for the general population….

As previous studies showed, the Swiss researchers found that there was a linear relationship between intelligence and effective leadership — but only up to a point. This association plateaued and then reversed at IQ 120. Leaders who scored above this threshold scored lowered on transformational and instrumental leadership than less intelligent leaders, as rated by standardized tests. Over an IQ score of 128, the poorer leadership style was plainer and statistically significant, as reported in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

It’s important to note at this point at these ‘very smart’ leaders didn’t employ detrimental leadership styles but rather just scored lower than their ‘less smart’ peers on useful leadership style.

You’ll notice that these findings are perfectly consistent with both the observed exclusion of the cognitive elite from the professional elite as well as my distinction between VHIQ and UHIQ. It may also help you understand why I consistently refuse the various leadership positions I am regularly offered as well as why I am so careful about the volunteers I accept.

I intensely dislike explaining things in unnecessary detail, much less justifying things to anyone, especially subordinates. I simply cannot work with people who insist on both a) having the obvious spelled out to them and b) taking umbrage at having things explained step-by-step for them from the beginning as if they were stupid. (Their words, not mine.) Here is the problem with that conceptual dichotomy: if you have to have the obvious spelled out to you, if you can’t immediately grasp the whole chain of reasoning from start to finish, then it is necessary to spell everything out from the beginning because the other person cannot possibly know at what point your ability to go from A to Z broke down.

Another problem is the way in which many, if not most, people are unable to recognize that for every effect, there must be a cause. If I ask a question, then I want the answer to it. I don’t care if you’ve told me the answer 40 times before. I don’t care if you think I should already know the answer. I don’t care if you think there is a different question that I should have asked. Just answer the damned question; I guarantee doing so will take considerably less time than engaging in a debate over any of the various possible permutations of a discussion exploring the reasons why you should not be under any obligation to answer the aforementioned question. What is more likely, the probability that I have forgotten what you have said or the probability that I derive some sort of strange pleasure from forcing you to answer the same question again? Just answer the question that was asked. If that causes any questions to arise on your part, that’s fine, but ask them after you answer mine first.

I have also noticed that many people seem to rather enjoy playing dumb, ignoring the most likely context, and insisting on having everything explained to them instead of using their common sense to assume the probable. For example, if I say “wash the car” to my friend, is it reasonable for him to say, “whatever car do you mean? There are millions, tens of millions of cars in the world? How can I possibly take action when I have no idea what car you could possibly be referring to?”

To which my response is: “There is one car in the driveway. It is mine. It is dirty. You borrowed it yesterday. Do you really think I am referring to the presidential limo – no, wait, let’s not confuse you and be too general, do you really think I am referring to the U.S. presidential limo?”

Now, the most likely context may or may not be the correct one. But it is surely the correct assumption, which one can either listen and wait to see confirmed by subsequent details, or in the absence of those, a simple question. But to pretend that no actionable information has been presented and that one is operating in a complete absence of data is false, disingenuous, and may even be reasonably considered dishonest. Whether this behavior is the result of looking to excuse inaction, to avoid thinking, or to avoid any responsibility for decision-making, I do not know. Regardless, a highly intelligent person is likely to find this sort of pedantic pseudo-ignorance to be aggravating, and thereby, right from the start, find himself behind the leadership eight-ball in the eyes of his subordinates.

In my opinion, an important aspect of good leadership is a collection of good followers who actively want to be led. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the “poorer leadership” line of demarcation observed happens to almost perfectly line up with the so-called 2SD “communications gap”. Unfortunately, I don’t have any useful advice for the 2SD+ crowd, other than “find smarter subordinates” and “never be surprised by any failure to understand what you think to be obvious.”