Skip (David) Everling > Recent Status Updates

Haha "Popular culture is plumbing new depths of dumbth..."

"Micro-geography of liberalism [in cities, along coasts and waterways, natural hubs] suggests moral trend away from community, authority, and purity is indeed an effect of mobility and cosmopolitanism."

Over time societies move toward the more recently developed progressive relational models (Equality Matching & Fairness). Extrapolation of trend to next relational model is Rational/Legal (including Market Pricing) as the primary (but not sole) mode of moral thought.

Satire as moral change catalyst

Pinker offers some other scholars' interesting theories of recent & rapid biological evolution as cause for violence decline, but ultimately discards them for lack of clearer evidence.

Historical decrease in interest rates over last millenium is offered as evidence for long-term societal growth in self-control and forward-thinking.

Daly and Wilson propose an internal variable of self-control, how much one discounts the future, that is adjusted based on environmental stability and estimated time left to live.

Self-control can be exhausted (Baumeister), and when so-called ego depletion occurs people are more likely to exhibit individual baseline behaviors (as opposed to societally moderated normative behavior).

Empathy is a catalyst for, but not strictly the cause of, the expansion of rights, which through other "better angels" become societally ingrained in the form of policies and norms.

Psychological grounds for expanded empathy via media, including fiction

Empathy (in mind-reading connotation) involves reading thoughts (impaired in autism) and reading emotions (impaired in psychopaths). Ex: Dexter is an intelligent, psychopathic serial killer; he has learned to recognize emotions (nurtured by cop Dad) and change his behavior to manipulate or "fit in", but he has difficulty comprehending the emotional affect as the other feels it since he cannot feel similarly.

"Ideology" section is a good look at group dynamics and peer influence. Explains why otherwise unpopular and destructive ideas can become widely enforced.

Leviathan curbs revenge violence (through monopoly via justice system). Countries with weaker Rule of Law are more destructively vengeful.

Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is like adding memory, taking lessons from historical interaction to make adapted algorithms. Aside: Radiolab recently aired an episode featuring IPDs, maybe "The Good Show"?

Testosterone is for the regulation of dominance behavior (and naturally is about 5 times more plentiful in men than women). It doesn't correlate with violence per se, except in that it increases risk factors that contests of dominance will escalate to violence. A general effect of increased testosterone may be described as "feeling well and confident." Aside: I love that Pinker uses the Google NGram database.

Dominance is an adaptation to anarchy. Recalls Lord of the Flies and all the other stories of sudden isolation of a group from government and guided norms.

Author cameo at the prison camp latrine. A meta-comment, reminder of the auto-biographic of the story.

Time travel implies Determinism? Free will questioned.

The only commodity at stake in contests of Dominance is information.

On self-exaggeration, Positive Illusions: "It would be better for the species if no one exaggerated, but out brains were not selected for the benefit of the species, and no individual can afford to be the only honest one in a community of self-enhancers."

Myth of pure evil.

"Forward Panic" aka rampage occurs when one group in a prolonged state of tension with another discovers the opposition in a moment of vulnerability. See massacres, ethnic riots, police brutality.

"If I were to put my money on the single most important exogenous cause of the Rights Revolutions, it would be the technologies that made ideas and people increasingly mobile."

Hard problem of consciousness as it relates to animal rights movement

DVDs of 1969 - 1975 Sesame Street were labeled as "not suitable for children"

Calvin & Hobbes cartoon on p 441 :-)

Postpartum depression & "baby blues", rather than an unusual hormonal imbalance, may be a naturally evolved "evaluation period", an emotional distancing for determining if the mother is situated well enough to raise the child (as depression correlates with a harder, realistic life outlook over day-to-day optimism).

"Cultures that are classified as more individualistic, where people feel they are individuals with the right to pursue their own goals, have relatively less domestic violence against women than the cultures classified as collectivist, where people feel they are part of a community whose interests take precedence over their own."

Autonomy critical to rights revolutions in addition to earlier reforms in despotism, debt bondage, and cruel punishment.

Recalls The Blank Slate, wherein Pinker posits that the historically recent fear of reintroducing racial intolerance is swelling the nurture side of the nature v nurture debate. That is to say, an over-emphasis of "blank slate" equality due to a growing "underlying fear that if *anything* about human nature is innate, then differences among races or ethnic groups might be innate..."