November 2016: The New Normal

On Wednesday, the day after Election Day, in New York City (where both candidates gave their post-election speeches), the sky was cloudy and dark. The next day, it was sunny and warm for a November day.

As I watched the results come in on Tuesday night and gradually realized that it was not just a close election that would take a while before we saw the seemingly inevitable win for Hillary Clinton, but that Donald Trump had won decisively, I felt physically ill. I couldn't process the news. Calling the election an "upset" seemed to have a cruel double meaning. How could my country have elected a leader so odious and unqualified?

Encountering people on the street on Wednesday felt awkward, all of us aware of our national embarrassment. We heard reports of hate crimes committed by Trump supporters (some of which turned out to be hoaxes) and fears that America would descend into an authoritarian dystopia where overt bigotry runs rampant. Democrats and Republicans who had opposed Trump started thinking of charities to donate to and volunteer work to do, as if to offset the election results.

On the same day, we heard Hillary Clinton and President Obama speak about the news in an optimistic, level-headed way. The next day, the current and future presidents met for the first time and started working on the transition to the Trump administration. This is the new normal.

Accepting this will not mean acquiescing to everything, or even most things, that President Trump says or does. We should subject him to merciless scrutiny and criticism, just as we should with any other president. In fact, that will be possible only if we accept that he is legitimately the 45th President of the United States, and the time for protesting Trump's holding this office has passed. If you drown out any discussion of the specifics of his presidency with the familiar refrains that he's abnormal, racist, sexist, etc., you'll remove yourself from the realm of productive debates about the president.

Amid all the national squabbling about Trump that's been going on since June 16, 2015, a few indisputable facts stand out:

Trump said he'd run for president, and it was widely derided as something that would never happen, or, once he officially announced, as a short-lived publicity stunt.

Trump was right.

Trump said he'd win the Republican nomination, and virtually everyone said that wouldn't happen: he had a "hard ceiling" of support far below 50%, and eventually the rest of the field would narrow down to one main challenger who'd emerge as a consensus nominee.

Trump was right.

Trump said he'd win the presidency, and virtually every pundit said this was highly unlikely for any number of reasons: Clinton was ahead in the polls; she was the only one with a serious ground game; Trump had generally bombed the debates; his unfavorable rating was the highest of any presidential candidate in American history and especially bad with women and Hispanics; and it simply seemed implausible that such a person could ever be elected president.

Trump was right.

And he didn't win the election by just one state, as the most recent Republican president did twice. Trump apparently won Michigan, which was considered a blue state, and he won Pennsylvania, which was considered technically a swing state but with the footnote that no Republican candidate had won it since the '80s.

Trump has been wrong about many things. But on his ability to achieve his presidential goals, he's been more right than just about anyone else.

Of course, you might not want him to achieve his goals for his presidency.

But look at his long list of plans for his first 100 days in office. Some I disagree with, like tax cuts. Some are reiterations of unrealistic campaign themes, like getting Mexico to pay for a wall. Some I can't judge yet, like a vague promise to reduce corruption in Washington.

But some . . . actually seem like they just might be good ideas, like more school choice and streamlining the FDA's approval of medications.

And none of them involve turning America into a fascist dictatorship, forcibly removing citizens from the country, systematically violating due process, instituting apartheid, or squelching free speech.

It would be naive to expect any president to succeed in implementing all the best-sounding parts of their agenda. But if Trump is claiming he'll accomplish a number of things that sound like decent ideas, he might turn out to be right.

Let's wait and see. Let's give him a chance. And let's react to the particular things he does or doesn't do when he's in office, instead of unproductively agonizing over the general notion of him as president . . . as strange and troubling as that might be.

What are Americans most afraid of?

Americans are more afraid of tornadoes, reptiles, and Obamacare than of global warming; more afraid of insects than of death; more afraid of whites being in the minority than of robbery, rape, or murder; and more afraid of ghosts than of being judged based on race or gender.

How is Trump such an effective candidate?

Two advertising experts explain:

Many good ads or politicians will make a direct appeal to viewers' emotions—and of all the candidates in recent memory, Donald Trump may be the best at doing this. . . .

Think about the emotions anger and fear. They’re both low in appeal (no one wants to feel angry or fearful) but have high levels of engagement.

So what makes these two emotions so distinctive from each other? Empowerment. When you’re scared, you feel like you’re not in control. But when you’re angry, you feel the irresistible urge to speak out and take action. . . .

[Trump is] able to consistently evoke issues in a way that makes people feel anger, rather than fear. (Some of his opponents use fear; for example, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Ted Cruz told the crowd that the IRS “would start going after Christian schools, Christian charities, and…Christian churches.”)

And though Trump frequently raises issues that could elicit fear—terrorism, crime, economic collapse—he does so with indignation, which suggests that the audience should feel that way, too.

He’s angry, but not fearful.

That’s why he’s said that he favors soldiers that have been wounded over those that were captured: to Trump, surrendering under any circumstance connotes fear.

Then there’s Trump’s solution to the illegal immigrants who are supposedly overrunning the country: “throw the bums out, build a wall.”

As for China, he’ll argue that China is “stealing” jobs from the US (there’s the indignation)—and if he were in office, he wouldn’t let the nation “have its way with us.”

Furthermore, the feelings of anger he evokes lead to action on his behalf. Outraged voters are all too eager to post his videos on Facebook, retweet his tweets and promote his candidacy to friends and family.

Note what’s going on here: he simplifies complex issues, framing them in a way that’s intended to get a rise out of voters and infuriate them. But he presents solutions (often simplified, often unfeasible) in a way that comes across as clear—even obvious—and has the added benefit of making him appear in control.

In the end, it’s a calculated image that makes him an incredibly appealing candidate.

Norm MacDonald drops his usual deadpan and says an emotional goodbye to David Letterman.

Norm MacDonald closed his standup on the Late Show last week by saying this (via):

Mr. Letterman is not for the mawkish, and he has no truck for the sentimental. If something is true, it is not sentimental. And I say in truth, I love you.

A few points about Justice Scalia's comments on sexual orientation and murder

Speaking at Princeton University, Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder.

"I don't think it's necessary, but I think it's effective," Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.

Scalia has been giving speeches around the country to promote his new book, "Reading Law," and his lecture at Princeton comes just days after the court agreed to take on two cases that challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. . . .

"It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd,'" Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?"

(Source.)

My mom, Ann Althouse, links to that article and points out that Justice Antonin Scalia is "antagonizing — antoninonizing — students."

My thoughts on this:

1. I interpret Scalia's phrase "moral feelings against" to refer to disgust. He lends this an air of dignity by using the lofty word "moral," but what he's really talking about is a visceral or aesthetic reaction expressed by interjections like "Eww!" and "Yuck!" We need to think about whether it's actually legitimate for disgust to serve as a primary motivation and justification for passing a law. There's no question that there are good laws that prohibit behavior that happens to be found disgusting. But the question is whether mere disgust can justify a law that would otherwise not seem to have a rational justification. It's fine for people to be disgusted at the thought of a particular couple having sex or even showing any kind of affection. This could be based on any number of factors, including the couple's gender, age, or physical attractiveness. Most people would find it offputting to see certain couples do so much as kiss in a movie — more offputting than they would find a movie scene showing a brutal act of murder. There's a much wider audience for images of violence than for atonal chamber music, but as long as even 1% of the population finds that kind of music pleasant, some people are going to happily exercise their right to create it, no matter how large a majority experiences it as a bunch of noise with no redeeming value. I wouldn't want to live in a society where the presence or absence of such feelings of disgust and revulsion determined what kinds of behavior we're allowed to engage in.

2. I assume Justice Scalia realizes that mentioning gay people and murderers in the same breath is going to be very inflammatory to a lot of people, and isn't the best way to win over those who didn't already agree with him. (He winked at this by sardonically adding: "I'm surprised you aren't persuaded.") This doesn't mean his words were poorly chosen — he might have good reasons to try to stir up controversy over this. And, of course, he has a right to express his viewpoint in his own inimitable style even if he offends people. But while he's remarking on the way voters can make their decisions based on visceral repulsion, he might want to consider that many people are viscerally repulsed by the way he makes his point, and this may affect people's votes in future presidential elections.

3. What matters far more than anyone's visceral feelings about what is or isn't disgusting is this: Murder laws uphold the principle that everyone in a society should have equal rights and responsibilities.

Blogger of the Day: Andrew Sullivan, The Crusader

This is the first post in a new series: "Blogger of the Day." This will occur at irregular intervals — definitely not every day. With each post, I'll highlight a blogger I like. Some will be obscure enough that I might hope to give them a slight boost in traffic or visibility. Some will be so big that I can't possibly expect to give them any help. The first Blogger of the Day clearly falls into the latter category: Andrew Sullivan. (Wikipedia.)

He’s been blogging daily — on a blog he calls The Daily Dish but which everyone else just calls "Andrew Sullivan" — for exactly 10 years today. Here, he looks back on what he's proud of and "ashamed of" about that decade of blogging.

Today, he's running "Toasts or Roasts": other bloggers say what they like or don't like about his blog. So far, he's posted 16 men — including Dan Savage, Jonah Lehrer, Reihan Salam, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen, Marc Ambinder, and Ben Smith -- and 1 woman: my mom, Ann Althouse. She's the only who says anything critical, aside from a few others who blandly mention that they don't always agree with Sullivan. (She also describes how Sullivan's blog was responsible for her marriage.) Without her, it would have been all "Toast" and no "Roast." Good for Sullivan for including my mom's post: he didn't have to do that, but his homepage today would be pretty dull without her contribution. She concludes:

Andrew is always changing, and one could go through cycles of loving or hating him — I especially love the Andrew Sullivan of "The Great Gay Debate" — but it's not really worth getting all exercised about which Andrew Sullivan we're reading today. We keep reading.

Here's my Toast and Roast. But first, some background.

Sullivan was one of the first blogs I read on a regular basis — along with Talking Points Memo, Kausfiles, Instapundit, and Metafilter — circa 2000-2001. It's impressive that they're all still thriving, though you could also say there's a problem here: the blogs that got big early on tend to keep dominating the blogosphere. There isn't the space for some new brilliant person to come along and be a Sullivan or a Kaus or an Instapundit.

Of those 5 blogs, I still read 3 regularly: Kausfiles, Instapundit, and Metafilter. I don't read TPM much because it's no longer the same blog it was in the early 2000s. It used to be the dashed-off daily thoughts of a random journalist who had fled the American Prospect, apparently because he didn't fit neatly with that magazine's liberal orthodoxy. Josh Marshall was the kind of Democrat whose mind was flexible enough that he would praise Bush for his rhetoric in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and offer qualified support for the Iraq war. Today, TPM is a homogeneously liberal super-blog.

And in contrast to my mom's roast/toast to Sullivan, I can't say I always keep reading him no matter how matter how much he changes. The truth is that I don't read Sullivan regularly anymore.

Oh, I'm sure his blog continues to be excellent. But he got too passionately moralistic about every issue — especially when he would flip-flop on foreign policy without bothering to dampen his moralistic fervor.

However, I have to give him credit for recognizing his own failings: he wrote an unblinking mea culpa for supporting the Iraq war. In 2008, to mark 5 years into the war, he wrote that he had committed "four cardinal sins," one of which was "narrow moralism":

I became enamored of my own morality and this single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and that unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in anything much but self-righteousness. I saw war's unknowable consequences far too glibly.

Today, he says his

greatest failure by far in these ten years . . . was giving in to my legitimate but far-too-powerful emotions after 9/11 and cheer-leading for a war in Iraq that remains one of the most disgraceful, disastrous and murderous episodes in the history of American foreign policy. I was wrong - but more than wrong, I was dismissive of those who turned out to be right. Some of those I mocked I did so for the right reasons. But some I didn't listen to when I should have. All I can say is that the great virtue of this blog is that it gave me nowhere to hide. And if you read the archives, you can see my mind and soul twisting slowly in the wind of reality, as illusion after illusion fell from my eyes . . . . In many ways, you forced me. You demanded that I hold myself responsible for my errors and, yes, sins. And we did this together, you and I, in a way that no form of media had achieved before. So in the shame and error, there was some kind of achievement. At its best, that is what blogging can do.

Self-righteousness and dogmatism are generally not a perfect fit with foreign policy. Sullivan's style is what it is. It isn't perfect, as even he admits. But he has done far more good than most cheerleaders for the Iraq war by exposing and analyzing his own shortcomings in thinking about war.

But when I think of Sullivan's political voice, I won't think first about foreign policy. I'll think about the issue he showed me how to think about.



His opening remarks about same-sex marriage in that video (back in 1997, before he was a blogger) are dated. He thought Hawaii was soon to be the first state in the US with same-sex marriage; the first such state was Massachusetts in 2004, and Hawaii still doesn't have it. He didn't do a great job at predicting the future, but his message still has great resonance today.

I was going to find some choice moment of this video, transcribe it, and quote it here to draw your attention to it. But I would have felt like just transcribing the whole thing. So please, watch the whole thing. To say this is Sullivan at his best would be an understatement.

I love how he starts by giving definitions of homosexuality and heterosexuality that seem so uncontroversial as to be hardly worth explaining — and then leverages those definitions into his case for same-sex marriage (both as something that should happen and as the most important front in the gay rights movement).

Though he's often criticized as overly emotional about political issues, he took the political issue he feels the most strongly about in his life and made his case with lucid logic. He did it when it was a lot less popular than it is now, and he did it over and over.

Thank you, Andrew Sullivan. You have made a difference.



UPDATE: Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for including this post as one of the "toasts and roasts" on his blog today.


(Photo of Andrew Sullivan by Trey Ratcliff.)

How to use "What would I regret the most?" to make life decisions

"Regrets of the Dying" is a bittersweetly inspiring piece by Bronnie Ware on her blog, Inspiration and Chai (via <— via).

Ware used to work in palliative care for "patients . . . who had gone home to die . . . for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives." She had the chance to hear them answer the question what they regretted most, and her blog post lists "the most common five" (she doesn't say if these are in order of how common they are, or just ordered for the sake of having a list):

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. . . .

2. I wish I didn't work so hard. . . .

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. . . .

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. . . .

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

She notes that #2 especially affects men. I wonder if #3 does too.

Instapundit emphasizes the striking observation Ware gives in explaining #5:

“Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.”

Althouse adds:

Why are you doing what you are doing? Do you need death staring you in the face to take that question seriously?

I don't know about that, but what seems clear is that death staring people in the face changes people's answers about what they regret the most. An article in the New York Times in March 2009 — back when the recession felt more dire — said:

Now that shoppers have sworn off credit cards, we’re risking an epidemic of a hitherto neglected affliction: saver’s remorse.

The victims won’t evoke much sympathy — don’t expect any telethons — but their condition is real enough to merit a new label. Consumer psychologists call it hyperopia, the medical term for farsightedness and the opposite of myopia, nearsightedness, because it’s the result of people looking too far ahead. They’re so obsessed with preparing for the future that they can’t enjoy the present, and they end up looking back sadly on all their lost opportunities for fun. . . .

Splurging on a vacation or a pair of shoes or a plasma television can produce an immediate case of buyer’s remorse, but that feeling isn’t permanent, according to Ran Kivetz of Columbia University and Anat Keinan of Harvard. In one study, these consumer psychologists asked college students how they felt about the balance of work and play on their winter breaks.

Immediately after the break, the students’ chief regrets were over not doing enough studying, working and saving money. But when they contemplated their winter break a year afterward, they were more likely to regret not having enough fun, not traveling and not spending money. And when alumni returned for their 40th reunion, they had even stronger regrets about too much work and not enough play on their collegiate breaks.

“People feel guilty about hedonism right afterwards, but as time passes the guilt dissipates,” said Dr. Kivetz, a professor of marketing at the Columbia Business School. “At some point there’s a reversal, and what builds up is this wistful feeling of missing out on life’s pleasures.”

He and Dr. Keinan managed to change consumers’ behavior simply by asking a few questions to bus riders going to outlet stores and to other shoppers shortly before Black Friday.

The people who were asked to imagine how they would feel the following week about their purchases proceeded to shop thriftily for basic necessities, like underwear and socks. But people who were asked to imagine how they’d feel about their purchases in the distant future responded by spending more money and concentrating on indulgences like jewelry and designer jeans [sic — the NYT uses no period at the end of this paragraph]

“When I look back at my life,” one of these high rollers explained, “I like remembering myself happy. So if it makes me happy, it’s worth it.”

Back when I was in school, right after I had turned in a paper, I used to relish the feeling: "That's it! I'm free. I can't redo it. No matter how good or bad a job I did, whether I put in too much work or not enough work, it's not my problem anymore."

Now, that feeling of mine was, in a sense, irrational and unrealistic. It actually still mattered how well I did on those papers I had turned in, because there were going to be other papers in the future that I'd also need to do a good job on. If you still care about the assignments you've already turned in, this can help you take your work in the future more seriously. Even if you're turning your last paper before your graduate, your concern for the work you've already finished is going to carry over into your work ethic in a job or a job interview.

But someone at the end of their whole life has no need for any such concern. If you're in hospice care, you have little motivation to analyze how various specific tradeoffs you made throughout your life actually affected how enjoyable and fulfilling your life was from day to day. If you know you have almost no future and one of your most important remaining goals is to minimize your pain, it makes a lot of sense to adopt a hedonistic perspective on your life. Though these sentiments may be some of the patients' last words, they are not the last word in how we should live our lives.

Back to that New York Times article — I found it from an excellent blog about psychology and statistics called The Mentaculus. The blogger, Andy McKenzie, has a "working assumption that every human tendency is on a spectrum." He describes how he used the idea of regret to channel his decision making before reading the Times piece:

I've used the regret heuristic in the past with mostly positive but somewhat mixed success. I've probably actively thought "Will I regret this?" around 15 times in the past year and about 10 of those decisions I would now characterize as positive. But there's something missing from that simple approach.

After reading the Times article, he concluded that the way someone applies the "regret heuristic"

will vary based on what time scale he/she chooses. Perhaps the best strategy is to estimate whether you will regret something in 5 days and also whether you will regret it in 5 years. Then, use both estimates in making your decision.

McKenzie's "regret heuristic" on a "spectrum" would seem to be a more sophisticated tool for making life decisions — if only you could keep in mind such an elaborate formula and apply it effectively. Whether you could actually manage to run your decisions through this heuristic, full of unknown variables, is another question. The goals expressed by Ware's patients — "happiness," being "true to yourself" — might seem more idealistic and hedonistic. But they're also more accessible and simple, which could make them more efficient decision-making tools.

IN THE COMMENTS: McKenzie responds.

Unpleasant research on unpleasant experiences

This New York Times blog post promises to tell us "Why Women Find Their Parents Unpleasant."

If you click the link, you'll see a graph with blue and pink bars showing how often men and women have "unpleasant" experiences with their bosses, co-workers, parents, spouses, children, and friends, and when alone (as a percentage of the total time spent in each of those situations). The researchers' term for these unpleasant experiences is the "U-index," which means how much of the time people report that they "feel more stressed, sad or in pain than they feel happy."

Catherine Rampell (the author of the blog post) sums up the findings:

It’s probably no surprise that people find spending time with their bosses . . . to be most unpleasant. Almost a third of the time that women spend around their bosses feels unpleasant; for men, nearly half of the time spent around supervisors is unpleasant. It’s also probably no surprise that hanging out with friends — the people we choose to spend time with — is least unpleasant.

For most of the categories, men and women report being in an unpleasant state about the same portion of the time. But the biggest divergences relate to spending time with family, and not in the way that stereotypes of feminine domestic bliss might predict: Women appear much less happy when spending time with their children and parents than men do.

Though these findings would seem not to be very flattering to women, Rampell cleverly spins them the other way:

[W]hen women are spending time with their children, they are more likely to be doing chores and handling child care, which can both be relatively stressful activities. When men spend time with their children, on the other hand, they spend relatively more time watching television and traveling — more leisurely activities.

The biggest gap relates to how men and women feel when spending time with their parents. When men are around their parents, they are in an unpleasant state about 7 percent of the time. Women find being around their parents to be unpleasant 27 percent of the time.

Again, some of this can be explained by what men versus women are likely to be doing when they’re with their parents. . . . [W]omen are more likely to be tasked with caring for their elderly or disabled parents than their male counterparts are.

So, Rampell seems to be following my mom's rule on how to research findings on gender:

[I]f you're going to explain gender difference, you've got to assume that whatever the women are doing is good, and it's the men who have the problem.

Can there be any doubt that if the research had instead showed that men find it unpleasant to be with their parents almost 4 times as often women, this would have been reported in the New York Times in a way that would (still) praise women and criticize men?

But I'll give Rampell credit for not just going with the above politically correct explanations. She emphasizes the study's finding that

[e]ven if you control for these different types of activities — that is, even when both genders are engaging in the exact same labors or pastimes with their kin — there are still "sizable differences in the U-index between men and women when they are in the company of their parents or children."

I honestly don't know what explains this. But here's one hypothesis by a NYT reader:

[M]others are more critical and demanding of their daughters, and fathers are more critical and demanding of their sons. Women tend to outlive men, so visiting ones parents is most likely to means "visiting one's widowed or divorced elderly mother" than some other scenario. That means more misery for the adult daughters than for adults sons.

UPDATE: Lots of responses in the comments over here.

Is Wikipedia the worst offender in ruining the Rorschach test?

The New York Times lets us know that the Wikipedia entry for "Rorschach test" includes reproductions of all the ink blots (which aren't copyrighted). And watch out -- the whole thing is really dramatic and exciting, as the Times makes sure you're aware by telling you how angry everyone is:

[I]n the last few months, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been engulfed in a furious debate involving psychologists who are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each. For them, the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT.

They are pitted against the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia’s users, who share the site’s “free culture” ethos, which opposes the suppression of information that it is legal to publish....

“The only winners seem to be those for whom this issue has become personal, and who see this as a game in which victory means having their way,” one Wikipedia poster named Faustian wrote on Monday, adding, “Just don’t pretend you are doing anything other than harming scientific research.”

What had been a simmering dispute over the reproduction of a single plate reached new heights in June when James Heilman, an emergency-room doctor from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, posted images of all 10 plates to the bottom of the article about the test, along with what research had found to be the most popular responses for each.

“I just wanted to raise the bar — whether one should keep a single image on Wikipedia seemed absurd to me, so I put all 10 up,” Dr. Heilman said in an interview. “The debate has exploded from there.”

Wow! OK, I understand the psychologists' point. I do think they should consider seeing a psychiatrist about their explosive anger.

But they shouldn't pretend that this is anything new. I've had a book called Big Secrets, by William Poundstone, since the mid '90s. Now, that book isn't as bad as Wikipedia -- it's worse. See, the Wikipedia page gives extremely sparse descriptions of potential answers, like this:

Plate 2 (two humans)

That's Wikipedia's entire description of Plate 2 (aside from reprinting the plate itself). In contrast, the Big Secrets book says this about the same plate:

It is important to see this blot as two human figures -- usually females or clowns. If you don't, it's seen as a sign that you have trouble relating to people. You may give other responses as well, such as cave entrance (the triangular white space between the two figures) and butterfly (the red "vagina," bottom center).

Should you mention the penis and vagina? Not necessarily.... You may not say that the lower red area looks like a vagina, but psychologists assume that what you do say will show how you feel about women. Nix on "crab"; stick with "butterfly."

The book gives similarly revealing analyses for all the plates.

Oh, but isn't it disingenuous of me to suggest that Big Secrets and Wikipedia are equally important? Come on -- Wikipedia is on the internet, and we all know that's what people read these days, right?

First of all, I wish people would be more explicit about their assumptions. If we're supposed to know that intelligent people are more likely to turn to Wikipedia than books for information, then fine -- let's say that openly. But let's also remember that point when it comes time to debate whether Wikipedia is a second-class or first-class source of knowledge.

But anyway, Big Secrets actually is available on the internet -- on Amazon. You can find it by searching for [rorschach], and it's the first result if you search for [rorschach secrets]. From there, you can read all the salacious details about the ink blots, since Amazon allows you to search the book's full text. So let's see the psychologists channel some of their rage against William Poundstone and Amazon.

Can you give a neurological or evolutionary explanation of love without debunking the whole idea of love?

Eric Schwitzgebel talks about his feelings for his young child in this post on The Splintered Mind. He says:

[I]f an evolutionary biologist comes along and tells me: “yes, but these feelings of 'love' are really just a bunch of neurons firing—these feelings have been naturally selected for so that parents would care for offspring long enough for them to pass along their genes,” I’d shrug my shoulders or perhaps ask for more details. But this mechanistic/evolutionary explanation wouldn’t in any way undermine my love for my daughter or debunk my belief that I truly love her. Why? Because I’m a naturalist and never presumed that love wouldn’t have this type of explanation.

However, I know people who don’t feel this way about love—someone named Ashley for example. For Ashley, real love cannot just be neurons firing because it was adaptive for her ancestors to have those neurons firing. Real love must have its source in something completely unrelated to the struggle for survival and reproduction. Naturalistic explanations terrify Ashley precisely because they do undermine her belief that she truly loves her children or partner.

But would/should these explanations debunk her belief that she loves her children? . . . [W]hat, in the end, does/should Ashley think about her belief in the existence of her love—is it (a) false or (b) just in need of revision? . . .

[W]e have no agreed-upon method for determining when a belief has been explained and when it has been explained away.

That last point is hugely consequential. It's something to keep in mind when reading the latest New York Times article about researchers who have conducted some experiment that conveniently solves a philosophical problem that's been debated for centuries. Anytime I see one of those articles, I'm betting the experiment doesn't really solve the philosophy problem — even under the generous assumption that their data have been collected using the best available methodologies and reported with scrupulous impartiality.

I'm an anti-reductionist. In other words, I'm skeptical whenever someone, having described how something works, says, "And that's all there is." Even if this person's description is accurate as far as it goes, it might not have gone far enough. One kind of analysis might reveal certain truths, while other equally valid truths are accessible only through other means.

So I don't feel that the very idea of love is threatened by neuroscience or evolutionary psychology. This isn't because I'm privy to some grand theory that unifies our intuitions about love with a scientific explanation of it. But I assume that one could have such a comprehensive understanding in an ideal world.

I don't know if anyone has done so yet. I certainly haven't. But the fact that there are huge areas of life that people haven't yet fully explained doesn't make me despondent or stop me from living my life as usual.

On AskPhilosophers, someone asks:

Suppose that a neuroscientist is studying love, and she discovers that romantic infatuation is caused by high serotonin levels, while attachment is caused by oxytocin. Has she actually learned anything about love? More generally, what is the significance of discovering neural or hormonal correlates to particular human emotions or behavior?

The philosopher Peter Smith responds, taking a view similar to mine:

Compare: someone who tells us about the chemical composition of the pigments used in Botticelli’s Primavera has told us something about the painting. But again such discoveries don’t help us understand the painting in the way that matters, as a work of art, as part of the human world: understanding that requires something quite different from chemistry....

If Mercutio whispers in Romeo's ear, "It's the serotonin, old chap", will that change his feelings for Juliet? Has his love been rudely unmasked, e.g. as just a desire for cheap chemical thrills?

I don't suppose Romeo is much in the mood to be distracted by such thoughts. But, waiting for Juliet's household to get to bed so he can climb up to her balcony, he might reflect how interesting the chemistry of love must be (and one day, when he has less pressing business to attend to, he must learn more about it).... Romeo is only too glad that he is young, his chemical systems are bursting with vim and vigour, and his brain still gets awash with serotonin at the sight of a pretty girl. He is very happy, so to speak, to go with the chemical flow.

So Romeo’s feelings for Juliet aren’t changed by reflecting on their neural causes any more than my belief that there is a screen in front of me and my desire for chocolate are changed by reflecting on their causes. And he’ll think that the fact that his feelings have a “chemical composition” no more shows that they are just chemistry (in any important sense) than the fact that our scientist showed that Primavera is just a load of old chemicals! His feelings have a role and place in his life and it is that which matters about them.

I'm with Romeo on this.

My reading list, part 2

See this post for the beginning of the list, and the premise.

6. Upheavals of Thought - Martha Nussbaum

A thoughtful and emotional book arguing that emotions contain more thought than they're given credit for. 


7. Descartes's Error - Antonio Damosio

Sort of the flipside of #6: rational thought requires emotions -- contrary to the traditional belief that reason and feelings are distinct mental faculties that "d[on't] mix any more than oil and water."


8. Ruling Passions - Simon Blackburn

Similarly, this would go very well with #6 and #7. The basic position is: ethics depends on emotions, yet this doesn't mean that ethical principles are "relative" or "subjective." There's also an intriguing tangent on the connection between aesthetics and ethics. 


9. Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? - Christopher Heath Wellman & Alan John Simmons

Well? Is there?


10. Lifting the Fog of Legalese - Joseph Kimble

Trying to send "null and void" into the void.

Would having children make me happier?

I don't know the answer to that, of course. But it'd be pretty useful to know!

So this is a welcome finding -- not because I necessarily agree with the conclusion, but because the question is so emotionally charged that it's refreshing to see someone even attempt to answer it objectively:

"Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not."

Responding to Will Wilkinson's blog post on that study, Megan McArdle says: "I don't understand why Will Wilkinson finds this" -- that is, the study's findings -- "so surprising."

I don't understand why McArdle finds Wilkinson so surprised! I don't see the slightest expression of surprise in Wilkinson's post.

On the contrary, it seems like he has a pretty unflinchingly realistic take on the whole thing:

[T]he profundity of the experience of loving a child I think blinds many people to the very real costs of raising them. To accept that we have been made less happy in a real sense by our children threatens our sense of the profundity and the value of that bond. So people get upset when they hear this. But that’s not counter-evidence.

Those last two sentences are ones I had to re-read a few times to make sure I absorbed them. This is a key point that's often overlooked: your visceral aversion to an idea doesn't mean the idea is wrong.

What are the disadvantages of being male?

A few weeks ago, I made this point, which I want to get back to (isn't it great when you've been blogging long enough to quote yourself?):

Both genders face huge and distinct disadvantages. I'd be hard-pressed to say whether it's more unfortunate to be a man or a woman.

As a thought-experiment, you could imagine -- apologies to John Rawls and his veil of ignorance -- that you haven't been born yet and you get to choose which gender you want to live your life as. You get to be fully informed about what the world is like, but all you know about your future life is that you'll be a human being growing up in the United States. (Significantly, you don't know your race or sexual orientation.) Which gender would you choose to be? I think some people would choose to be a man, and others would choose to be a woman, and it's far from obvious what the wiser choice would be.

I want to focus on the male-disadvantages side of this question, which I find more interesting because it's not talked about as much.

I'm well aware that the person who suggests, at least in certain kinds of elite circles, that maybe there are some not-so-great things about being a man is likely not be heard. Civil discussion will end. You aren't allowed to talk about, or think about, the idea that while gender roles, norms, traditions, stereotypes, etc. have certainly been bad for women ... they might also be bad for men too.

It's odd: I would have thought that if that's true, then it would actually strengthen the case for feminism. If everyone is burdened by antiquated gender rules, isn't that twice as bad as if half the population were burdened?

But even if you honestly believed there were no disadvantages to being a man, what would be your motivation to silence those who suggest otherwise? Why wouldn't you want a completely free debate in which anyone is allowed to marshall whatever evidence they want and get a fair hearing? In a free debate, anyone who doesn't have the facts on their side will be revealed as wrong. You shouldn't need to decide in advance which are the correct views and which are the incorrect views and shout down anything that falls under the latter category.

It's hard for me to imagine a much clearer example of this phenomenon than a recent set of discussion threads on Metafilter. It's rare that you have such a clear-cut instance of taboo enforcement preserved for all to see, so I want to take a look at this. (I have first-hand experience with the same thing in the real world, but can't really blog about it.)

The other day, someone posted a question to AskMetafilter, essentially asking: What are the advantages of being a man? (For those who aren't familiar with it, Metafilter is a "community" website written by thousands of users; one section is called AskMetafilter, where people post questions on any topic for other users to answer. Anyone can read it, but you pay a nominal one-time fee to add content.)

So I decided to post the reverse: What are the disadvantages of being a man? Both questions immediately began drawing a variety of thoughtful answers.

Well, guess what happened. The website's moderators deleted my question, but allowed the first question to stay.

I asked them about this discrepancy and got conflicting answers from the three Metafilter moderators. One of them said the distinction was that the other person's question was inspired by a book and mine wasn't. Funny -- I wasn't aware that Metafilter had a rule that your question has to be inspired by a book. (There was only one passing reference to the book, and it didn't seem to have any effect on the question.) Another moderator said the difference was that I started out my question with a few suggested answers of my own. Well, even if you accept that that's a reason to delete a question, the other question did the same thing, so that can't explain it. The last moderator said there actually wasn't any difference between the two questions except that mine was asked after the first one; they would have deleted the other one if it had been reversed. Maybe an interesting theory (albeit inconsistent with what the other moderators said) ... but the site often allows two back-to-back related questions -- they never seemed to have a policy of rejecting these until I asked my question.

Bottom line: they couldn't offer any principled reason for allowing one question (What are some advantages of being a man?) while deleting mine (What are some disadvantages of being a man?).

Draw your own conclusion.

Of course, I wasn't happy with this. But there's nothing I can do, right? Well, all I can do is preserve some especially thoughtful answers my question received.

Just to be totally clear: none of this is an attempt to make some kind of "argument against feminism." It's just that no one, no matter what theories they subscribe to, has a legitimate reason to want to ignore a huge chunk of reality. If you're going to contemplate gender at all, you might as well take in all of it -- the good and bad of being a man or woman.

I'm not trying to cancel out feminism. I'm trying to add to it.

Anyway, I started my question by noting:

Men are more likely to be victims of violent crime, go to prison, be forced to fight for their country if there's a draft, be socially expected to hold down a steady job, lose their parental rights in the event of divorce, and die younger.

(Those all seem to be pretty clearly bad things about being a man, though some people contested this point.)

Here are some of the responses I got (each paragraph represents a different comment):

You will be seen as an aggressive person or a threat even when you aren't one.

You tend to be more and more frequently distracted by sexual cues and later at developing social poise. Females are generally better socialized than males - males tend to have a harder time in social situations.

It isn't safe for a man to be alone with unrelated children -- he could be accused of being a child molester. This is not a perception that exists for women.

You have external, sensitive genitalia and we have pointy shoes! ;P

You are likely to be socialized never to admit weakness, confusion or doubt, and struggle with loneliness because of it.

As a young man in the US, you get to pay more for car insurance.

It's hard to talk to girls without people automatically assuming that I want to sleep with them.

Sex drive, often higher in men, can be a double edged sword (see, look, phallic symbolism already...) leading to distraction and frustration that otherwise may not be an issue.

Physical aggression, ranging from military service to playground tussels, is a much greater part of male life.

Many psychiatric organizations seem to think men, on the whole, cope with anger and sadness poorly compared to women. Women seem more likely to seek the support of others, men seem to end up loners more often.

I've heard it's often difficult for single men to adopt, compared to single women.

Acting outside gender roles can result in social fallout. A man becoming an interior decorator, poet, or actor would, in many social circles in the West, be considered a sissy, or have their sexuality questioned (by both sexes). Women transgressing similar norms may (as things improve) be thought empowered (female construction worker). This ties in to the emotional lives of men as well -- showing "weakness" in a healthy way is likely to cause a great deal of ridicule.

Being a gay man seems to carry more trouble than being a gay woman.

Many disorders seem to afflict men more often -- Autism and ADD come to mind. [As a New York Times article put it: "from the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood — and underappreciated — vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup."]

Widespread expectations of a greater male role in sexual activity -- a responsibility for its success or failure.

Men (at least in most places in the US) often pay much much more than women to get into clubs and bars. It is very usual to go to bars where women often enter for free while guys have to pay, I have never seen the opposite. There are clubs where men need to, regardless of their willingness to pay, have at least one (usually good looking) woman with them to get in.

In traditional cultures, there can be a great deal of pressure on male children to succeed -- whether it be carrying on the family business, producing heirs, or avenging the family name.

There is a stigma attached to a male expressing emotions.

The thread was only around for about an hour, but all these answers were deleted from the site (preserved only if you saved the URL, but not generally accessible from the website). I'm sure there would have been more items added to the list if the thread had stayed up. (Feel free to post some in the comments.)

Someone else made a valiant attempt to keep the conversation going by starting a new thread:

I enjoy being a guy, but one thing I have philosophized about is the stunted intimacy. I don't mean sexual intimacy, which is just one subset intimacy, but rather the unguarded closeness and surrender and trust and sharing that any two people can experience, such as a mother and child. Men have much less of this, at least in western culture.

It is culturally acceptable and natural for them to display and indulge in a level of intimacy and affection with each other that is simply not in the realm of possibilities between men. Can you imagine two straight men, who are friends, sitting on a couch together with their arms around each other, looking into each other's eyes, maybe one comforting the other, hand softly on his neck, or crying or something? Unless you're 6 and the other guy is your dad, that isn't going to happen, the obvious exception excluded. I know that regional cultures can make this more or less of a possibility for women too, but I think you know what I'm saying. To think of two men doing that kicks up a visceral gender-role police enforcement squad in one's lizard brain. What? WHAT?! It's so deeply ingrained that it's alarming when the sediment is disturbed. Or think about walking arm in arm down the street. No way. Guys have made a lot of strides in shedding machismo, but not to that degree. ...

And the thing is, I think I can speak for men when I say we don't want those things. It's not like we secretly want them but cruel society won't let us have them -- it's that we simply weren't trained that way, or maybe it's a combination of biology and culture. Because of my socialization and the way gender roles are mapped out in our culture, I was essentially programmed that this was not an option any more than flying is, or that there could be some primary color other than the ones we know of. It isn't something you think about or regret, it simply doesn't exist. ...

So then isn't it a deficit for me as a man that I don't have the same level of opportunity for intimacy as a woman? Shouldn't that be recognized as a pretty awful missing piece in the human journey?

Unlike my question, the moderators did leave this thread on the site ... but they immediately closed it to further discussion.

None of this is meant to minimize the oppression of women. It's not about pushing women away and saying, "Please don't bother us with your petty complaints." It's about drawing men in by saying, "Look, gender disparities hurt everyone -- it's not just a woman thing."

I understand that the response might be: it all comes down to rape and domestic violence. There's nothing men have to deal with that's on that level.

Well, it's not quite that simple. Not all rape victims are women. They can be men or women. It's well-known that this often happens to men in prison. Of course, this is usually just laughed at (as is female-against-male domestic violence) because -- to add one more item to the list -- society is more concerned about "protecting" women than men (which follows logically from the belief that women are weak).

By definition, we can't know about all the unreported rapes. But which gender do you think would be more hesitant to report it out of shame or a need to always appear tough?

That said, of course I take rape very seriously and recognize that it disproportionately harms women. I'm not even contending that anything from the above list is as serious as rape. Even if you're absolutely convinced that rape and domestic violence trump anything on the list of disadvantages of being a man, that's no reason to ignore those disadvantages. So it shouldn't be taboo to say, "Hey, there are some disadvantages to being a man, such as X, Y, and Z." This should always just be part of the equation, part of the conversation.

My message to liberal women: if you really want feminism to be a powerful force for changing people's minds, you need a message that will resonate with both sexes. The idea that men simply have it easy, and that women bear all the great burdens, won't -- more to the point, shouldn't -- convince men. Oh, there will be men who'll go along with this for the sake of political correctness. But any man who has thought seriously about gender and being a man in modern society will not buy into this.

Looking over the above list, I still feel like there's one big disadvantage for men that all of this is missing, maybe the biggest burden of all. But that will have to wait for another blog post, as this one is already ridiculously long.

The world is complicated. This may not be fashionable to point out, but it's reality.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Mom! And Glenn! And Reddit user ejp1082. And Dean. And Conservative Grapevine. And Villainous Company. And Church of Rationality.

UPDATE: Metapost.