Stephen Pinker at the Long Now

Posted on October 9, 2012 by ScottJackisch

I went to see Pinker’s talk at the Long Now this evening. He is promoting his latest book “The Better Angels of our Nature” in which he proposes that many forms of violence have declined over time. His previous TED talk on this topic caused “Sex at Dawn” author Christopher Ryan to criticize his characterization of hunter gatherer society as violent. But Pinker’s talk this evening focused mostly on the last 500 years and stayed away from prehistoric man.

I liked it when Pinker pointed out that when people say that the 20th century was the most violent in history, they never mention any other centuries to compare it to. He had data that showed that even World War II was only the 9th most deadly event in human history on a per capita basis. I do agree with his view that per capita violence is the only intelligent way to measure it.

When evaluating causes of this great decline in violence, Pinker asserts that literacy played a greater role than wealth. English wealth was fairly flat during a great decline in murder and capital punishment, but efficiency of book production and literacy greatly increased. He posits that reading allows us to be in the mind of others to some extent and naturally increases empathy. It also supposedly decreases ignorance and superstition which may lead to violence.

Another cause of this decrease is alleged to be cosmopolitanism. As humans rub shoulders with one another in cities, it forces them to share ideas and develop some tolerance of others. Our allegiances expand outward from family and tribe to include our entire nationstate and on to other races, sexes, and children.

Pinker says that there is a propensity for genocidal totalitarians to push anti-city, back to nature ideologies. Pol Pot’s Year Zero, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and even Hitler’s Lebensraum all focused on pushing urban populations into rural areas. Stewart Brand commented on the fact that many of his contemporaries had followed suit and went out into the countryside only to become bored and returning to the cities. Brand regrets that more of his friends don’t acknowledge the failure of this experiment.

Several times during the closing discussion with Brand, Pinker said that he was excited by social network science. He mentioned the study of how social norms arise from individuals exchanging ideas explored in the work of Nicolas Christakis, Duncan Watts, James Fowler, Michael Macey. I was deeply impressed by Connected by Christakis, so I will definitely be checking out these other researchers as well.

Overall, I enjoyed this talk. I sense that Pinker is trying to defend the narrative of progress and the virtues of Western Civilization that are so maligned in this post-modernist era. More power to him.

Consequences of Objectivism vs. Constructivism

Posted on July 18, 2012 by ScottJackisch

I had a conversation at CFAR last night in which we discussed the consequences of an objectivist vs a constructivist viewpoint. An objectivist statement might sound something like “there is a reality that exists in the absence of any observers.” A constructivist response might be “properties or characteristics of reality are a function of observer coupling with reality.” And an objectivist reaction would be “well, duh. Tell me something I don’t know.” So I doubt that there are any hard objectivists really. But then what good is constructivism?

One difference might be that the constructivist viewpoint privileges the observer’s role in reality definition. The constructivist might be biased to pay more attention to the observer when considering definitions of reality. In this way it might be compared to post-modernism which is something I hadn’t thought of but was suggested by a member of CFAR and it does make sense. So we might expect that people slavishly sticking to objectivist viewpoints would be less aware of observer biases. And this is where I reach the conclusion that I haven’t met any strict objectivists. I don’t know anyone who might otherwise be labelled objectivist who isn’t interested in cognitive biases.

Another related example is the “brain-centric” view of cognition criticized by the constructivists (enactivists) like Noë or Thompson. Those who hold a “brain-centric” view of cognition might be accused of overlooking ways in which the body or inter-subjective experience defines cognition. So I might expect someone who oversubscribes to the brain-centric view of cognition to reject the findings of Christakis on social influence on behavior. However, I have yet to meet this strawman brain-centric individual. The enactivists are presumably fighting against someone though. I guess I will dig through the literature and see if I can find any viewpoints to populate the other side of this argument.

Comfort vs. Freedom

Posted on June 14, 2012 by ScottJackisch

A friend recently sent me an essay attacking social media that contained the following quote:

Consumerism promises that magical transformations are easy, available on demand, and that a self understood in terms of lifestyles and personality experiments—rather than in terms of communal tradition, meaningful work, or the continuity of life experience—can be a worthy expression of individual freedom.

This run-on sentence jumped out at me because I have long struggled with the trade-offs between traditional life and modernity. I tend to prefer the modern to the traditional. I hate to see the sorts of constraints placed on people from traditional cultures. Women are cattle, queers are hung, and innovators are set on fire. On the other hand, I recognize that modern life leaves us isolated and adrift. It’s comforting to know your place and purpose in the universe as provided by faith and tradition.

Any group (or intersubjective identity for you post-modernists) provides some amount of constraint and comfort as opposed to the freedom and isolation of the individual. Baseball fans watching a game together exert peer pressure to prevent any member from switching the channel to the Home Shopping Network, but they have a lot of fun. It’s just better for self-realization to have choices about the groups that we become part of. We have always had complex identities that changed with the context: friend, family member, hunter/gatherer. Our very mind seems to be a shifting competition between semi-autonomous urges, interests, and styles. Modern life gives us the opportunity to more fully explore our composite natures. It’s just isn’t easy.