Why Men are Reluctant to Attack Donald Trump

As a follow-up to my last post, I thought that some explanation regarding why Donald Trump, who is clearly an incompetent and corrupt leader with a major psychiatric disorder, receives so little resistance from other males, some of whom are powerful. Their subservience to him is astounding in historical terms. As I said earlier, Richard Nixon left office voluntarily after considerably less-significant violations of the law. Trump has elevated himself to the level of one of the greatest criminals in American history, yet he still receives little public criticism. To me, as an amateur evolutionary biologist, Trump is exhibiting classic alpha male primate behavior, and, because all humans are primates, they accept his behavior instinctively without thinking about it much. There have also been social and economic conditions that have caused males to revert to their primate instincts to some extent. Over the past several decades, feminism, contraception and employment opportunities have reduced female dependence on males, and this has been a blow to male egos. Furthermore, the evolution of the economy has significantly reduced the number of available well-paying jobs for males. In addition, the pandemic caused families to spend more time together at home, and this added to male-female stresses, because, among primates, males and females tend to live separately – nuclear families are not the norm. The upshot is that males have generally undergone a reduction in social status in recent years, and, rather than attracting harems of beautiful women, they are being given the cold shoulder. Where Trump comes in, I think, is that he lives the way that many men would like to live, though they would never admit it. The absence of critical thinking in men has caused them to overlook the fact that Trump has a history of making poor decisions. A related fact, I think, is that women themselves tend to respect men less now than they used to. There is currently a popular narrative among women that they are the victims of male abuse. That may be accurate in some situations, but to me it seems as if many women are unable to determine whether that is actually the case in their situation.

Just as a brief refresher, I should recap some of Trump's offenses. From his first term, he will be remembered for wasting the time of the federal government with two impeachments, followed by lying about his political loss in 2020 and supporting an illegal attack on congress. He was also sympathetic to the scientifically unsupported anti-vax movement. In his second term, which has barely begun, he has appointed some of the most unqualified people in American history to join his administration, threatened other countries with large tariffs and staged an attempted coup in Los Angeles. He has also ignored constitutional rights in the deportation of immigrants. Each phase in the ascent of Trump's rise to power has resembled a new episode of The Emperor's New Clothes. I think that the underlying dynamic is that unhappy American males have provided enough support to Republicans that they have been willing to overlook Trump's deficiencies. Trump literally is an act, and I can't say that I've identified any examples from any time in his life where he actually said or did anything that was in the public interest. Currently, men admire him, I think, because they would love to behave foolishly, attract throngs of gold-digging women and enjoy themselves without ever taking responsibility for anything or being held accountable. This aspect of the Trump phenomenon can be explained as male worship of male primate behavior. Trump has also attracted some opportunistic women, but their numbers are considerably lower.

The question becomes "Why do otherwise intelligent men support Trump?" This is a little more difficult to answer. The Republican politicians among them feel compelled to protect their political careers: this is a purely selfish motive. The tech billionaires also seem to be greedy, and supporting Trump is a lower risk to them than opposing him. In the case of some of them, Elon Musk for example, he has his own set of psychiatric problems and probably overestimated the probability of benefitting from an alliance with Trump. Trump's life history consists primarily of benefitting at someone else's expense.

My main view of this situation hasn't changed. It isn't a question of whether Trump will succeed in the long-term. It is demonstrably impossible for him to succeed, because none of his policies are well-thought-out, and most of his appointees are unqualified. At the moment, Trump and his Republican allies are attempting to delay the inevitable economic and social disaster that is brewing until after he leaves office.

Why Greater Awareness is Necessary in the U.S.

While there is an abundance of information available now for most people to study topics of interest to them, one of my chief sources of cognitive dissonance these days is that politicians, corporations and the news media have increasingly channeled public discussion into narrow channels that collectively tend to block out conceptually challenging topics. Although I am completely sick of thinking about Donald Trump, viewing images of him, hearing him speak, and having to read and see inadequate discussions about him, the Trump phenomenon in public life is the best example of what is wrong in the U.S at this moment. I've already written about how the internet and social media have stirred up a lot of confusion, but I think that, additionally, it is necessary to discuss in detail some of Trump's specific shortcomings. What I find unsettling is that Trump is never confronted directly about his enormous deficiencies and weaknesses as a person, which are particularly important now that he is the de facto most powerful person in the world.

First, it has to be said that Trump is deeply ignorant. He doesn't read, and most of his ideas are ones that he adopted by habituation while he was growing up. In those days, women and minorities did not have equal rights, gay people were generally in the closet, there was little evidence of impending global warming, and businessmen in New York City often operated in a cutthroat manner. Trump displayed dishonesty at an early age by hiring a person to take the SAT for him. Most of Trump's "ideas" are longstanding formulations that he has been using to get his way throughout his life. As far as I've been able to determine, what little curiosity he has tends to focus on ways to manipulate people to meet his objectives. This seems to be the same pattern followed by his father and his father's father. Some of his grandfather's wealth came from prostitution, and this may have influenced Trump's attitude toward women.

During his second term as president, it is easier to identify his thinking processes than it was during his first term. In the first term he was battling his own appointees and faced with impeachment twice, and the pandemic added to the confusion. In his second term, he has concentrated on consolidating his power and is consciously copying Viktor Orbán of Hungary. It is already apparent that he has no understanding of world economics, and it seems that his advisors are generally unwilling to take the risk of enlightening him if they know better. Trump's primary transactional methodology seems to be to inflict pain of one kind or another and then switch plans if the first one doesn't achieve the desired results. I think that this is one of the best examples of how deeply ignorant Trump really is. It is obvious that he has no understanding of global economics, and he is simply operating on his old business model from his real estate background, which also failed. When he first rolled out his tariff plan, he had not anticipated the extent to which it would roil world financial markets, and he was essentially forced to cancel it immediately. I also find it instructive to examine him as an arbiter of conflict resolution between world leaders. He has already given up on creating a Ukraine-Russia resolution, and he even seems to have encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu to escalate the genocide in Gaza. In both instances, since there was nothing in it for him, he had a hard time staying focused. Following his instincts, he prefers to spend his time soliciting bribes from Arab states and bilking people with new cryptocurrency schemes. Traditionally, Trump and his family have been grifters, and that is still their default model.

The other main deficiencies in Trump, I think, are psychiatric in nature. It seems that, within a political context, bringing up psychiatric issues is a taboo. There is currently a slight drift toward an easing, at least with respect to senility, but technically that isn't a psychiatric issue. Age was brought up for Ronald Reagan in his second term, so there is a historical precedent. A lot has already been written about Trump's psychiatric state, even by a niece and nephew. More significantly, "200 mental health professionals" warned "that Donald Trump is dangerous because of 'his symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder – malignant narcissism.'" Although psychiatry does not get much attention in America, I think that this description of Trump is reasonably accurate. I think that anyone who has paid attention to him for several years can pick this up easily, without much convincing. At this point, Trump's psychological makeup is far more dangerous than Joe Biden's senility would have been if he had been reelected. I have yet to see any full-scale discussion of this problem in the news media. 

What can readily be observed now is that Trump has been unable to resolve any significant issues within his purview, ranging from the federal budget deficit to appropriate taxation to international conflicts. Rather, Trump is simply continuing his cycle of bullying, intimidation and empty proposals. It is readily apparent that, not only is he distracting from the resolution of issues that are of public importance, but that he may actually just prefer to punish people unfairly for his personal enjoyment. To him, minorities, immigrants, women and non-binary people are fair game. Also, because he was an academic dunce, he seems to derive a sadistic pleasure from punishing Ivy League universities. 

I am getting tired of hearing the word "democracy" being used as a panacea for issues such as the Trump phenomenon. Since Trump was duly elected in an accepted democratic process, I think that the focus should shift toward greater public awareness. We should now be barraged with news, videos, podcasts and articles regarding the dangers of the Trump presidency. This may be absent because we are living in an increasingly corporate-controlled country, where the calculated costs of challenging Trump are often outweighing the benefits.

Corruption in America: A Fifty-Ring Circus

I've been reading this new book by Oguzhan Dincer and Michael Johnston. At first, I wasn't sure whether I'd comment on it, and I decided that it is somewhat interesting and provides new ideas that describe some of the behavior in the U.S. While, over long periods of time, various sociological changes occur here, the news media never seems to capture them adequately, and this is particularly true now, when news has become, in Jennifer Rubin's word, "stenography." This book is quite academic and includes definitions, data and statistical analysis, but it still provides a relevant look at current American culture.

Before starting, I should say that, in my view, sociological analysis isn't valued enough in the U.S. Especially in recent years, when you hear "The people have spoken," you have to brace yourself for the possibility that Donald Trump has won an election. For me, in an ideal world, the U.S. government would be a large sociology department, which would cover economics, law, social welfare, equality and national defense. Clearly, the American public isn't sophisticated enough to vote rationally in an environment where, not only are they barraged with misinformation and disinformation, but the entire political edifice that began in 1776 has essentially become obsolete. My hope is that, in a few years, government will become partially or fully automated, with AI and robots performing most tasks: someday, children may no longer have to be frightened by the nightmarish images of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Corruption in America doesn't seem to have been a major topic in recent years. That is probably because corruption is considerably more conspicuous in some other countries than it is here. However, it has always existed everywhere, and it is of some value to examine it locally. Dincer and Johnston break down corruption into two main types: legal and illegal. While illegal corruption is subject to criminal penalties, much actual corruption is legally permitted. This is expressed well in a quotation from George Washington Plunkitt, a New York State Senator of Tammany Hall:

I seen my opportunities and I took 'em. Just let me explain by examples. My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I'm tipped off, say that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain't it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that's honest graft.

Various topics come up in the book. The authors think that corruption played a role during the COVID pandemic. Specifically, some groups were more responsive to calls for social distancing and vaccination than others. Traditional television viewers were more compliant than social media viewers.

Generally, what I liked the best was the mappings of legal and illegal corruption and political subcultures by state. These maps themselves don't provide any solutions to current domestic disagreements, but they do offer glimpses into somewhat intractable regional differences. Many of the most corrupt states, Louisiana and Kentucky, for example, are in the South. Many of the least corrupt states, Vermont, Washington and Wyoming, for example, are in the North. Political subcultures are classified as moralistic, individualistic and traditional, or a combination of two of these. Most of the moralistic states are in the North, and most of the traditional states are in the South. The individualistic states are more evenly spread out. From glancing at this map, I would guess that the individualistic states tend to be more business-friendly. It also looks to me as if the traditional + individualistic states are generally more corrupt than other states. That also includes Louisiana and Kentucky. 

For my preferences, the exclusively moralistic states may be the most livable in terms of their social environments. But you would also have to examine other regional characteristics. The full moralistic list includes Oregon, Utah, Colorado, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont and Maine. It is probably significant that even though the Bible Belt is in the South, the moralistic belt is in the North. This is reminiscent of the antislavery movement originating in the North. I also think that the business-friendly states in the South may be the most polluted and the most vulnerable to climate change.

Paradigm Shift Overload

Because I'm tired of biographies at the moment, I thought that I would instead write about how I see the current malaise that seems to be affecting people, especially in the U.S. The phrase "paradigm shift" was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although that's really just a fancy way of saying that scientific models change over time, you can extrapolate from it that most conceptual models generated by humans change over time, and sometimes they are completely replaced by new models. A simple example is the change from the geocentric model of the solar system to the heliocentric model. Scientists are constantly attempting to explain the universe, and occasionally one theory completely replaces another. Sometimes theoretical fissures last for many decades, and there has been a dual model in physics where gravitational theory operates independently from quantum theory, and the two models seem incompatible. This state of affairs has been around since Einstein, and he was unable to reconcile the two systems. Other conceptual models in science can become problematic over time, and, as Sabine Hossenfelder laments in Lost in Math, some physicists have recently become so enraptured by mathematical aesthetics that they seem to have lost interest in experimental data, which is the basis for empirical models.

The reason why I'm bringing this up is that, as an observer of people, it is fairly obvious to me that a rapid increase in the number of public conceptual models employed by people in the developed world is causing a higher level of stress than that which occurred during earlier historical periods. Broadly speaking, humans have evolved to live in groups, and, historically, that required the members of each group to operate on similar ideologies and worldviews. When the world population was much lower, ideological conflict between groups was less common than it is today, because groups simply didn't run into each other as often as they do now. With a much larger world population, and with most religions evolving into various sects, individual countries may have conflicting ideologies both internally and externally. Probably that kind of conflict was rare two-thousand years ago in the individual lives of people, but it has gradually increased and accelerated in the last two-hundred years. In the preceding colonial period, Europeans simply traveled to North and South America and took whatever they wanted, and if the natives caused too much trouble, they just killed them. A similar attitude was adopted more recently in the American South, where slaves were considered personal property until after the Civil War. The gist is that, within a long-term historical context, people didn't recognize belief systems that differed from their own, and, even up until the late nineteenth century, it was often thought that indigenous populations were subhuman species.

What has changed since the end of the last century is a partial migration of group identities from regional cultures to social media cultures. There have been many negative consequences to this, and I'll discuss some of them here. Before the internet came into existence, people often had face-to-face encounters with people who lived in their areas, and this was the primary source of their worldviews and was supported by local news media and local governments. Unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, the internet has gradually taken on an important role by replacing traditional TV programming and news with material that can be produced anywhere, with content and ideas that did not originate locally. This phenomenon has been influencing local ideas for over twenty-five years now, and some of the perspectives that have arisen in particular locales do not represent the historical ideas of a region. One of the effects of this change has been the rise of various opinion leaders and politicians whose careers would have been impossible fifty years ago. The best example that I can think of is the disgrace and resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 compared to the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024. In Nixon's case, indications of bad character alone forced him to resign or else be removed by impeachment. In Trump's case, although his behavior has been considerably worse than Nixon's – he is a convicted felon and a known rapist – he won reelection by a margin. In the culture of 1974, that could not have occurred.  

In recent years, many individuals have mobilized on social media for their personal benefit. They are now able to reach groups that were invisible a few years ago and seed them with propaganda that places them in the role of opinion leaders without having to face any consequences. They can convince people that the shooting of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax or that they are successful executives when they are not. If you think about it, it is truly astounding that Donald Trump was reelected after several members of his own administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, stated publicly that he was unfit for office. While there are probably false ideas floating around most of the time, there have never before been as many as there are now. If you look at this from the point of view of human cognition, many people are unable to navigate an environment like this on their own. Few people are able to form opinions independently from a group that they identify as their peers. Unfortunately, the people whom they think are their peers may just be internet hucksters these days. It is possible that new regulations will correct this in the coming years, but that is certainly unlikely to occur under the new Trump administration. Trump has been one of the most successful corrupt abusers of social media. 

When I see people viewing their cell phones in public constantly, they are starting to resemble addicts in need of a fix. It seems that some sort of therapy could be developed for these people, but I'm not sure that it exists now. I think that the core of the problem is that humans in general have not adapted to an environment in which numerous worldviews, which are often incompatible with each other, are presented to them. 

Are Private Universities Corporate Proxies?

Dating back to the 1960's, I've always had difficulty understanding campus protest. I mean that not in the sense of not understanding the concerns of the protesters, which are usually readily apparent, but in the sense of the logic of campus protest itself. My cognitive dissonance usually occurs more with private colleges and universities than with public ones. In the U.S., public universities are readily funded by state governments, and most of their students are residents of those particular states, so there is a discernible connection between the protestors and the local political process. Since this is supposed to be a democratic country, it makes more sense that protesters would express political views at a government-administered institution than at a private one. Of course, not all protests are political in nature, and I suppose that non-political protests can make sense anywhere.

The strange thing to me is that, for example, if a student at a private university disagrees with U.S. funding of the Israeli military that results in the killing and displacement of thousands of innocent Gaza civilians, there is an established process for addressing that concern: they could contact their congressional representative or senator or protest outside Congress. Their university has little or no connection to the relevant government proceedings, and its students do not necessarily have any say in university policies. Moreover, private universities are not funded by taxpayers, and the processes by which they fund themselves are not necessarily democratic. One might argue that private colleges and universities are "communities" that can build their own consensus through internal discussion or protest, but that view doesn't have legal footing: students are not true stakeholders and ultimately have no authority in how their private college or university is administered.

The situation with the Vietnam War was quite different from the Hamas-Israel War, because the U.S. itself was the aggressor. In that instance, general political objection to the war seemed reasonable. These days, college and university protests often call for the ending of purchase of stocks of the companies that are located in the country of the principal offenders. For example, colleges and universities were discouraged from buying South African stocks during apartheid and, more recently, the stocks of large oil companies that contribute to global warming. Now the protesters are calling for the divestment of Israeli stocks. While, theoretically, that can be construed as a suitable disincentive for Israel to continue the war, I don't consider that methodology appropriate for a couple of reasons. 

First, in the case of private colleges and universities, investment choices are beyond the purview of their students. The students are essentially customers. Their college or university may be around for hundreds of years, and its administrators have to figure out how to fund it well after the current students have departed. The protesting students can be seen as behaving like the customers of a traditional delicatessen who collectively march in and demand that the owners immediately change the menu to include only vegan and gluten-free items. The fact is that the customers don't own the store, and if they dislike the menu, no one is forcing them to buy food there. Also, more subtly, private colleges and universities in the U.S. are actually participating in the capitalist ecosystem of the country. In order to ensure the health of their institution, it is in their interest to produce graduates who go on to become wealthy and leave them bequests in their wills. The small colleges that didn't follow that model are dropping like flies now. I find it hard to take seriously the "values" of most private colleges and universities. Even when there are stated educational goals, their importance is purely symbolic when you consider the actual tasks required to sustain a private college or university over time. Most of them are devoted to the development of future donors purely as a matter of survival. That is why they coddle their alumni. The richer their alumni, the better.

Second, as a personal matter, I dislike the divestment argument because it trivializes the underlying conceptual framework of what is actually occurring. In this instance, I would rather hear a discussion of the errors made by Netanyahu and the long-term consequences of his behavior. The news media are missing in action as usual and aren't advocating a specific actionable plan. The protestors also seem to be sleepwalking through history and are unable to provide a coherent description of the situation. What, exactly, is the explanatory value of the word "hate"? With better journalism and more effective protest, the Gaza conflict might already have ended. Moreover, the current crisis has been brewing for decades, with the underlying problems festering for many years.

One of my corollaries here is that student protestors seem to be in denial of the fact that they and their universities inhabit a corporation-dominated world.

Art and Social Status

As I get older, I increasingly recognize the extent to which art is associated with social status. My Armenian great-grandfather lived in Bursa, Turkey, and he became wealthy by setting up import-export businesses. He exported carpets to the U.S. and imported pianos to Greece, among other businesses. His family immediately took an interest in French culture, and my grandfather traveled there on vacation. He had an arranged marriage with my grandmother, who, though half-Armenian, had a German mother who grew up in Paris. When my mother was growing up in Greece, they spoke French at home. My mother took an early interest in ballet and European art, and, after we moved to the U.S., my older sister took ballet lessons, and we often visited the art museums in Manhattan. My mother also liked classical music and played recordings of it at home. This all rubbed off on me, and I took an early interest in paintings and music. My English father had somewhat more pedestrian tastes.

As an adult, I've often noticed that, particularly in the West, wealthy people become art aficionados. This usually has more to do with social status than with the free time of the idle rich. There is usually a clear distinction between high art and low art, and social climbers generally avoid the latter. One of the reasons why high art tends to be better than low art is that, in historical terms, the wealthy have been spending their money on it for centuries, and they usually know the difference. The aristocrats in Vienna went into raptures over Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven and supported their careers. Without subsidy from the rich, Beethoven would have been poor. In Paris, the Impressionists were initially ridiculed, and Degas, who came from a wealthy family, never identified himself as one, though he exhibited with them.

The situation in the U.S. has been a little more complex. During the Gilded Age, wealthy Americans tended to copy wealthy Europeans, and they often mingled with wealthy British people. For example, Bertrand Russell's first wife was American. Rich Americans built English-style mansions, bought classical paintings, founded traditional art museums and listened to classical music. Fiction usually mimicked English fiction. The situation changed considerably during the twentieth century, particularly after World War I. Economically, the U.S. was on the ascent and Europe was in decline, and market forces began to influence what counted as art. In my view, art patronage changed considerably during this period, mainly due to the transition from informed patrons to market forces.

With the influence of market forces in the U.S., it became possible to make rapid changes in what counted as good art, and modern art, such as that produced by Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, became popular quickly, even among critics. It is not a coincidence that Warhol had a background in marketing. Music with African and folk elements developed into jazz and popular music, eventually causing classical music to go out of favor. To some extent, jazz still belongs in the category of fine art for aficionados, and it has had wealthy patrons. I don't think that the same can be said for popular music, though, incredibly to me, many people actually like hip-hop. I would go as far as to say that some of the popular music of the '60's and '70's can reasonably be called art, but calling it high art is still a stretch.

My views on writing are a little different, because language is part of being human, and it is difficult to extract oneself from it and look at it objectively. So, for me, though there can always be good essays, they don't necessarily count as art. Fiction is also on shaky ground. I think that the novel as an art form peaked in the late nineteenth century and may never recover. There is still some hope for poetry, because that isn't restricted to traditional forms of language usage. So, though poetry can be influenced by market forces, there is still room in it for high art that can be identified and appreciated by the cognoscenti. For me, poetry is one area that may survive commercialization, though, on a practical level, I find very little of contemporary poetry worthwhile. I don't think that many good poets can do it for a living.

There are other art forms, such as films and plays, and some of those, I think, qualify as art. However, with film in particular, cost-cutting and automation have already taken a toll if you compare recent productions to older ones.

I should also mention a subject that I've brought up many times: the negative effects of M.F.A. programs. Though, in theory, academic expertise could improve the arts, in practice it has primarily created cloistered art environments and is not as efficient as the earlier wealthy-patron model. There is the myth that artists can avoid the struggling-artist period by getting a graduate degree. They can't.

As a social phenomenon, the definition of art currently lies beyond the influence of people who, in earlier days, may have made reasonable cases for what counts as good art – Robert Hughes is now long-dead. In this market-driven era, many people seem to believe that what is good is whatever is "trending." Nothing could be further from the truth. The internet, besides all of the other damage that it has done, is killing good taste, or at least making it a historical relic.

Theories and Models: Understanding and Predicting Societal Collapse

This is a chapter by Sabin Roman in the new book, The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies, which can be downloaded at no charge. Existential risk is now a well-researched academic subject and is certainly worthy of attention. I may comment on other chapters, but this one attracted me first. 

Generally, societal collapse is associated with decreasing complexity. The chapter breaks down societal collapse into types. Exogenous factors and one-time events are one type. These include resource depletion, such as the deforestation of Easter Island as described by Jared Diamond, and soil degradation for the Maya civilization. They also include competition with other societies. And one-time events include volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts and solar flares. Roman sums up:

Overall, arguments based on competition with other societies, intruders, or catastrophes neglect the fact that these types of events have previously been encountered by a given society but no collapse occurred, e.g. earthquakes in Minoan civilization, barbarian attacks on the Roman front, or competition between the Mayan centres. In addition, these theories have the added difficulty of placing the drivers of the collapse outside of the society in question, which is incomplete from an epistemological perspective without accounting for changes in social structures and dynamics.

Another type is social structure and class conflict. This has been written about since 1377, by Ibn Khaldun, Edward Gibbon in the 18th century, and Arnold Toynbee in 1961. Many of the theories in this group include class conflict. Roman summarizes the limitations of this approach as follows:

The main difficulty in the explanations above is that they force the cause to be considered a single factor and posit the causal mechanism as a direct, linear process. Given the complexity of the systems involved, collapse is often a multi-faceted process that requires accounting for multiple interrelated factors. Simply listing the different contributing phenomena is insufficient to give us additional insight....

This leads to the third type of approach: feedback mechanisms. These were pioneered by Thomas Malthus in 1798, with his description of the relationship between agricultural productivity and population growth. More recently, this theory has been refined to argue that growing societies tend to reach a period of diminishing returns that may precipitate their collapse, and the increasing complexity of a society may eventually make it unmanageable. Roman writes:

A theory of collapse built on feedback mechanisms describing social dynamics is consistent with the nature of a complex system, wherein multiple interacting factors are present, the evolution is non-linear, and causality cannot be assigned to singular aspects of the system.

The fourth and final approach starts with the third and is based on quantitative models, which are broken down into two classes:

(a) agent-based models (ABMs), which represent individuals (or communities) as agents with set attributes and behavioural rules, such that a realistic rendering of relevant behaviour is desired with the aim of obtaining larger scale emergent phenomena. Often, they also explicitly model the spatially extended features, such as terrain; and 

(b) integrated world models, which employ a wide variety of modelling techniques (system dynamics, econometrics, etc.) and aim for an accurate, detailed representation of the system under study. They are complex models that use a large number of variables and parameters.

Several different quantitative models have been developed in recent years. The 'Limits to Growth' study by Donella Meadows focused on three 200-year scenarios from 1900 to 2100: one fitted to historical data, one to environmental sustainability and one to technology and industry:

The first and third scenarios led to a peak industrial output in the 21st century and a subsequent decline in economic activity and demographic levels. The sustainable case manages to reach a steady state with little loss of life, but it requires parameter choices that, in the real world, would require drastic action to curtail pollution and population growth.

Roman says that the economic-based models are hampered partly because "the fundamental assumption of rational human behavior is not justified empirically." So far, the quantitative models are not widely accepted by sociologists. He concludes:

If a common set of historical mechanisms can be found throughout multiple time periods and a modelling framework with a toolkit of methodologies adaptive to different scenarios can be built, then the science-fiction discipline of psychodynamics that Asimov imagined would be within reach.

I am glad that people like Sabin Roman are doing this work, because we are already seeing multiple examples of environmental decline, climate-related catastrophes, geopolitical tensions and poorly-informed populist movements. I agree with Martin Rees, who says in the preface that action must start with voters, because politicians have little incentive to address events that will play out after they have left office. Unfortunately, most voters don't respond to theories and models, and, more often than not, are scientifically illiterate. That is why I often conclude my posts with the hope that AI will soon come to the rescue and replace both capitalism and democracy. Though people may respond as conditions get worse, it is important to remember that capitalism brought us to where we are now and that democracy is not a foolproof system for addressing complex issues.

Popular Nonfiction May Distract from Better Ideas

Recently, I temporarily switched from reading accessible nonfiction books that are popular among educated readers to newly-published books issued by academic presses. One was from Cambridge and two were from M.I.T. As a matter of curiosity, I've been following their reception to see what kind of reactions they've evoked. Understandably, Paleolithic Europe, by Jennifer C. French, isn't attracting much attention, because it costs a lot and is specifically intended for an academic audience. However, I am surprised by the tepid response to Born Knowing, by Giorgio Vallortigara, and Reason and Less, by Vinod Goel, because they are not directed exclusively toward academic readers, aren't as expensive and include important findings in scientific research that I think have significant applications in the field of human cognition, not on a purely theoretical basis, but regarding the workings of cognitive functions that are evident in everyone's daily life. Of course, this kind of reaction is to be expected and corresponds with what I've said about the publishing industry. You won't necessarily make much money from good ideas, but you can usually make a lot of money by carefully promoting mediocre or bad ones simply by using existing commercial channels.

Born Knowing, I think, is relevant to a wide range of disciplines. At the most basic level, it shows how the neurological systems of all animals, both simple and complex, are the product of evolution, and, as such, are related primarily to survival and reproductive success and do not necessarily mirror what we might think of as objective reality. Our neurological systems mediate between us and the world. Although Vallortigara does not focus on human cognition, I think that he goes a long way toward refuting some of the ideas that are still popular among some philosophers. He seems inadvertently to be reviving Kant's concept of phenomena and noumena. In particular, I think that his findings can be construed as a refutation of Plato's Theory of Forms, and, more generally, of the objectivity of mathematics. In a way, he dovetails with Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and I think that this has enormous implications for what we think counts as objective knowledge. The book also makes clear that language is not necessary for rudimentary thinking, specifically in arithmetic and geometry. I would go a step further than Vallortigara and say that the reason why mathematics currently seems inadequate for solving the fundamental problems of physics could be that mathematics is an aspect of our neurological makeup and not something fundamental to nature. Organisms like us did not evolve to perform such tasks, and our neurological features may limit our capacities in that respect.

Reason and Less, for me, is valuable in a less theoretical sense, because it discusses our actual brain function. As I said in my comments about it, it provides a practical basis for critiquing public decision-making processes so as to minimize cognitive errors. I found Goel's model more useful than Daniel Kahneman's, as presented in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Goel shows how irrationality is intractably linked to rationality in the structure of the human brain, whereas Kahneman mistakenly, I think, suggests that, with the proper rewards and coaching, poor decisions can be minimized. Kahneman does not seem to recognize how cognitive dysfunction is endemic to humans, and that there is no such thing as a quick fix for this problem. In my view, Goel's model is more appropriate than Kahneman's at the policy level, because it takes into account the fact that the policymakers themselves are subject to the same kinds of errors as the people whom they are attempting to assist.

The point of this post, then, is that important findings such as those published by Vallortigara and Goel can easily become buried in the media and never get the attention that they deserve. At the same time, less significant ideas such as those put forward by Daniel Kahneman and pundits like Steven Pinker get all of the attention. Of course, there is always the chance that, over time, the better ideas of obscure academics will be promoted in academia and make their way to public consciousness. However, as the publishing system currently works, this can hardly be considered an efficient process. Thinking, Fast and Slow became a bestseller and made Kahneman a household name, while no one has heard of Vinod Goel. Similarly, Steven Pinker is one of the best-known public intellectuals in the world, while Giorgio Vallortigara remains an obscure researcher. Unsurprisingly, Kahneman published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Pinker with Penguin. These publishers have far larger production runs than the academic presses, and their purpose is to make money, not to promote good ideas. I suppose that this is just the way that the world works and is to be expected, but I still find it annoying that there are people out there who have good ideas which never make it into public consciousness, while lesser works dominate the media year after year. It is important to keep in mind that, at any given time, the ideas promoted by leading public intellectuals may be inferior to ones that are already circulating in smaller circles.

Reason and Less: Pursuing Food, Sex, and Politics IV

I've finished the book and overall find it to be quite good. I'll just sum up my reaction to the last few chapters.

One of the chapters is titled "When Failures of Belief Revision Are Less than Motivated Reasoning or Sloppy Reasoning." Goel writes:

In short, what I'm suggesting is that some false beliefs are resistant to rational evidence because the motivating desire is not a cognitive desire. It is a desire propped up by instinctual (and other) low-level subcortical systems....

This is one of the most important ideas in the book and is a good starting point for examining the current political polarization within many Western countries.

The next chapter, "Global Belief Revision is Constrained by Neural Maturation," describes how neural systems start out relatively fluid, but once they mature they become less flexible:

If the receptive window of opportunity is missed, no amount of sensory stimulation is going to change the organization of the mature visual or auditory cortex. Once this window passes, the organization of the primary cortex and associated subcortical structures is largely fixed. They cannot be reorganized or repurposed to deal with a radically different environment....These subconscious perceptual biases – even though they may be an accidental feature of the environment – will feed into the In-Group/Out-Group system and infiltrate up into presuppositions and belief systems.

The consequence is this:

If it is indeed the case that the scope for belief revision is limited after neural maturation of the association cortex, it has interesting implications for our standard cognitive and social science Platonic models of mind, where rationality is divorced from biology. Even if in some ideal world the machinery of reason may allow for extensive and perpetual belief revision, the actual biology that supports the machinery may not.

So, in addition to interplay between the different components of a mature brain, neural maturation separately limits change as people age. Goel notes that, according to a survey, young people are generally more receptive to the idea of anthropogenic climate change than older people. This may be because the older people grew up before global warming was a recognized phenomenon, and for this reason their brains do not recognize it as a significant risk.

Goel also includes an interesting personal anecdote that serves as an example. He was born to Indian parents in India. The family moved to Canada when he was young, and he grew up there. Later, when his family returned to India to visit relatives, he found that Indians all looked the same to him, and he could hardly distinguish them. I find this highly amusing, because, in politically correct circles, Goel would typically be described as a racist because of his visual insensitivity to Indians – in this case his own relatives. Obviously, this kind of political correctness is based entirely on biological ignorance. I could relate to this example, because I moved from the U.K. to the U.S. when I was seven and think that it affected my mental development. Since then, I have lived in eight different states, and I always notice that people who have lived only in one location, particularly if it is rural, tend to have very limited worldviews. Education may make a difference, but you can see how the environment affects brain development.

In the final chapter, Goel points out that his tethering model is different from the standard social science and cognitive model, which emphasizes rationality, and the standard evolutionary psychology modularity model, which emphasizes biology and evolution and minimizes the role of reason. I am inclined to agree with his model, because the role of reason is vastly exaggerated in economics and other social sciences, and this significantly reduces its usefulness for public policy. I am sympathetic with the biological/evolutionary approach, but agree with Goel in the sense that some room must be left for reason and its acceptance as a real phenomenon. What I like about Goel's model is that it allows one to speak intelligently about the mountains of cognitive errors that one confronts on a daily basis. As I've been saying, when trapped between right-wing ideology and political correctness, it is disturbing that no one before now has stepped up to address the intense cognitive dissonance that it can cause. This book is the first one that I've read that provides a usable model for that task. It is probably no coincidence that the book was written by a Canadian, who may be less worried about being fired for his views than his cowering American counterparts.

My only criticism of the book is that the subtitle is a little misleading. The main example about food concerns Goel's admission that he is unable to stop eating chocolate cake even though he knows that it makes him overweight and unhealthy. The main example about sex concerns John Edwards, the politician who had an affair while he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination and his wife was dying from cancer. Goel thinks that Edwards was stupid to have an affair at that time. The examples from politics include the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump and the fishing crisis in the Canadian Maritime provinces. Although I found the examples useful, I initially thought from the subtitle that food, sex and politics would be the central themes of the book, but, as it turned out, they were merely a few examples used to explain his theory. One could write volumes on the subtitle alone, and it is probably just as well that Goel remained focused on his model. Perhaps Goel or his publisher thought that "Sex" on the front cover would increase sales. I don't think it has so far.

Reason and Less: Pursuing Food, Sex, and Politics III

This is not a particularly long book, but I am reading it in short segments because it is written primarily for academics, and I've never taken a psychology or anatomy class (behaviorism was popular when I was in college and sounded incredibly boring). Goel's theory is fairly straightforward, and I have no significant objections to his argument, but he is going through all the paces to present his colleagues with a falsifiable theory and is dutifully recounting years of experimental results. He has described in detail the evolution and workings of the human brain and compared it to the brains of other species. Then he says:

Taking this neuroanatomy seriously has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of human behavior. It provides an underlying biological basis for the qualitative differences in autonomic, instinctive, associative, and reasoning behaviors. The biology suggests that the cognitive characterization of rationality as unhindered by more earthly concerns is not rooted in reality. The neuroanatomy paints a picture of hierarchically organized systems but with a clear tethering of newer systems to older ones. 

In the next chapter he makes a case for "feeling" as the mechanism that modulates between the chronologically separated components of human brain anatomy. I am doubtful that this approach will have much influence on his colleagues, but think that it is quite adequate for my purposes. Whether or not he can provide an academically acceptable model for human behavior, I think that it is sufficient as an intuitive model that one can understand through introspection. If you ever analyze your own reactions to different situations, you will notice that they are often based on your feelings about past situations that you experienced in your life. Thus, you are likely to weigh strong feelings that you had over tepid feelings, and in this manner you may make appropriate or inappropriate decisions. In my view, this is about the best that most people can hope to do in most situations, and I think that some of the rationalistic models presented in economics and cognitive science, on close examination, may be little more than status-bestowing presentations to those who are currently successful, wealthy, or both. That is why I was skeptical of the Steven Pinker-Bill Gates alliance celebrating the triumph of reason at this stage in our collective history. I am inclined to think that humans have a limited capacity to understand much of anything, and although science is usually better than the alternatives, we may be incapable of truly understanding many highly complex phenomena.

For my purposes, I am happy that Goel brings up actual cases of public cognitive mistakes. He describes the fishing dilemma in the Canadian Maritime provinces from the 1970's to the 1990's. There was a precipitous drop in cod catches in 1974, and the Canadian government intervened and set limits on cod fishing. The cod fishermen rejected the quotas and applied political pressure to have them raised. As a result, by 1992 the cod population was practically eradicated, and the fisheries accordingly went out of business. This example shows how individual self-interest can backfire when people don't follow rational procedures for the benefit of a group as a whole. Goel uses this example as a parallel to the public's lack of responsiveness to warnings about climate change. I am hoping that he will have more to say about public irrationality in the remaining chapters, because that is probably the greatest problem of our time. The underlying issue is that human nature allows people to act in self-interest even when the long-term consequences of that behavior are extremely negative. In this instance, despite an effort by the government to protect the fishermen, their irrationality sabotaged the actions taken to assist them.

Although, in a practical sense, this is a more complete treatment of human cognitive limitations than that of the other authors I mentioned, I don't think that Goel will be extending the discussion as far as I would like. At the moment we have not only destructive autocrats making the world unsafe for millions of people, but also millions of people in democratic countries making poor choices about political candidates. This isn't a simple case of democracies being better than autocracies, because, as is clear from Goel's examples, either system can result in catastrophic mistakes. We are currently in a situation in which we have to worry not only about deranged autocrats, but also about deranged democratic voters. Faith in democracy is looking pretty misguided at the moment. It's as if we just wasted four years worrying about what the idiot who was elected president of the U.S. would do next, only to waste more time worrying about what the idiot Russian autocrat would do next. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has to be one of the stupidest and most destructive events since World War II.

I am approaching the end of the book and will wrap up on my next post.

Reason and Less: Pursuing Food, Sex, and Politics II

While, so far, I am broadly in agreement with Goel's model, I am not particularly enjoying the presentation, which includes a fairly detailed history of cognitive science, going all the way back to William James and covering B.F. Skinner in some detail. In the context of his argument, their ideas apply primarily to the associative aspects of cognition and don't account for reason. He is gradually working from the autonomic to the instinctive to the associative to the reasoning modes, and most of the research is dated. He also rehashes the more recent research of Daniel Kahneman, which I don't find particularly enlightening. And he quotes several philosophers, who, as you might expect, I don't think add much to the discussion. However, unlike Kahneman, he is including research from evolutionary psychology, which I find helpful, and he is open to seeing cognitive science through an evolutionary lens. Above all, more than any other books I've read, he is applying his model to important real-world situations, such as Donald Trump's first impeachment. The Republican "arguments" in support of Trump's innocence were primarily ad hominem attacks on his critics:

None of these responses address the coherence relation between evidence and conclusion, that is, the soundness of the arguments for impeachment. They all commit common reasoning fallacies, but they do so intentionally, consciously, rationally! The official impeachment counteroffensive relied on the calculation that most of the MAGA faithful would fail to accept any evidence of wrongdoing by the President, if universal in-group/out-group instinctual systems could be activated. The group we belong to is always good, pure, innocent, and of course beloved of God; the out-group consists of elites, socialists, Muslims, and others trying to destroy us and our way of life for nefarious purposes....

As straightforward as this analysis is, you don't generally hear it in the news media, which coddles the public to such an extent that popular public figures are rarely criticized. Because of this, the news media is actually encouraging public irrationality.

I won't attempt to rehash all of the details of the book as I read it, and I'll just throw out whatever thoughts occur to me. There is the omission of Kant among the philosophers whom he quotes, and I think that at the moment one of Kant's ideas is at the vanguard of biological research into cognition. In Born Knowing: Imprinting and the Origins of Knowledge, by Giorgio Vallortigara, the argument is made that chicks perform more sophisticated cognitive tasks than one would expect with a neural configuration based on a sort of template of the world, which they have acquired through evolution. In all likelihood, all animals have such templates, and the template of one species is likely to be similar to the template of another. What is interesting is that these templates probably originated through an evolutionary process in which natural selection permitted organisms to survive when they had a template that triggered behavior that was appropriate for real-world situations. In the case of mathematics, even chicks were able to make calculations without the use of language or symbols. 

Where Kant comes in is with his distinction between phenomena and noumena. Phenomena are the things that organisms perceive, and noumena are the reality behind their perceptions. The sensing organs of animals create perceptions, but animals have no direct access to the objects that cause them. Thus, animals, including us, behave as if the environment follows mathematical rules, but, since we lack direct access to reality, we can only know what our perceptions, which are produced by neural systems, tell us. According to Vallortigara, evolution is what caused these neural systems to exist, so it cannot be said, for example, that the world itself follows mathematical rules. We can only say that organisms with particular neurological arrangements survive, while others do not. Although this position does not contradict anything that Goel says, it places rationality in a humbler position than he seems to advocate.

Another area that Goel hasn't brought up yet in the book is the development of language in humans, as discussed in the books by Gaia Vince and Nichola Raihani that I covered earlier. I think that the existence of language alone explains most of what counts as human rationality and sets us apart from other species. Although language probably evolved for the dissemination of knowledge, it is probably the only biological feature available for engaging in the analyses which, on this planet, only humans are capable of making. So, in addition to the kinds of analyses that animals are able to perform in order to evaluate situations, the development of language, along with increases in brain size, allowed humans to engage in abstract reasoning.

Reason and Less: Pursuing Food, Sex, and Politics I

I'm now underway on this new book by Vinod Goel, and will be discussing it for a few weeks. Goel is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at York University, Toronto. This is the first book that I've come across that offers a comprehensive perspective on human cognition over a wide range of areas and addresses some of the associated real-world problems. My other readings have covered the same territory, but usually with a narrower focus: Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler tell us that we don't always think clearly and can improve ourselves with the help of libertarian paternalism; Steven Sloman tells us that we don't know much, but that we can get around that by cooperating with others; Robert Plomin tells us that our life outcomes are largely determined by our genes; Frans de Waal tells us that we're not much smarter than animals; and Robert Sapolsky chimes in to tell us that we're sort of stuck with our animal brains. Goel's view covers most of this territory, but his objective is specifically to develop a multidisciplinary model of how human reason is modulated by our evolutionary history, and how we can give reason the upper hand in real-world situations in which we behave irrationally to our own detriment. Because this book was not intended to be a bestseller and is more specifically academic, I am finding the discussion somewhat more interesting and theoretically useful than the others mentioned.

Goel's model is called tethered rationality and he describes it as follows:

The "animal passions," or nonreasoning behaviors in technical parlance, include autonomic behaviors, instinctive behaviors, and associative learning behaviors. These behaviors and their underlying mechanisms have been studied extensively over the past hundred years. They differ not only from reasoned behavior but also from each other. They are hierarchically organized in terms of appearance on the evolutionary tree, are integrated, and are widely available across species, including humans. Humans also exhibit reasoning or rational behavior, which (I will argue) is unique to us. However, it does not supplant the evolutionarily older behaviors. Reason evolved on top of them, but it does not "float" untethered above them; it is tightly integrated with both bottom-up and top-down connections. This means that human behavior is a blended function of all these systems, not just reason (or any other individual system). Humans have a reasoning mind, but it is tethered to and modulated by evolutionarily older associative, instinctive, and autonomic minds. 

I find this model more appealing than any others that I'm aware of. The System 1 and System 2 model used by Kahneman and Thaler is too oversimplified to be of much use, and it seems to me that, by advocating libertarian paternalism, they are inadvertently promoting a social hierarchy which favors the economically successful over the economically unsuccessful, and as a result they may actually be endorsing a two-tier social structure which, in the end, would become nothing more than a new measure of social status, i.e., rich = smart, poor = stupid. Sloman emphasizes human ignorance, but does not offer much of a solution. Plomin is primarily a genetic determinist, but also has little to say about the social implications of his work. De Waal is mainly an apologist for animals, and does not address human cognitive limitations. Sapolsky is well aware of the haphazard evolutionary construction of the human brain, but isn't interested in how this bears out in our political or other institutions.

Goel's objective in this book is broader, and he hopes to address some of the serious cognitive errors that turn up routinely in public life. He uses examples of persistent, scientifically confirmed errors, such as climate change denial and opposition to inexpensive healthcare systems, to show how unreason overpowers reason in our brains. However, in his defense of rationalism, he may not have answers to deterministic positions that Sapolsky and others may hold. He is operating roughly from the psychology/sociology/cognitive science group of fields, which generally hold that humans are the only truly rational species, despite somewhat intractable intrusions of irrationality. Although, in the end, he may only come up with a slightly more complete description of the modules of cognitive dysfunction than Kahneman was able to, of all the authors I've mentioned, he is the only one who seems interested in countering the ridiculous statements that pass for normal in national and world politics. 

To his credit, Goel also seems willing to take on some of the false precepts of political correctness. So far, like Robert Sapolsky, he has explained in detail why gender is not a social construct and is in fact determined by known biological processes. He also backs E.O. Wilson regarding the unfair attacks that he experienced with the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. As I've often said, liberals and politically correct people, then and now, have been unable to accept biological determinism as playing a role in our species – thus, ignorance still holds sway in leading universities. 

Anarchic Trends in Political Evolution

When I began this blog eight years ago, the impetus was my frustration with online publications and Internet discussion generally. I had noticed that American intellectuals had no influence on domestic or international policy and had merely been scribbling away during the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War and the Tea Party movement without solving any problems and, quite rightly, being ignored. Since then, with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the Capitol attack of 2021 and the anti-vax movement of today, a much broader failure of traditional media is evident. Not only are American intellectuals irrelevant, but so are most newspapers, magazines and television news programs. This turn of events in the U.S., Canada and much of Europe is making the political order seem more unstable than it has been in decades.

As I've often said, it is appalling that Donald Trump was elected president. Of course, this was merely symptomatic of deeper social ills which have since then more clearly manifested themselves. First, it was greedy small business owners and disenfranchised blue-collar workers, and now it's also truck drivers and poorly-educated people in general. It has been dispiriting to observe the stodgy, pro-business Republican Party of 1950 evolve into an unhinged far-right organization that openly suppresses the democratic process and is supporting dishonest opportunists in order to gain political power. To be clear, I am not primarily in favor of democracy, and my preference is for rational laws based on the concepts of equality, human wellbeing and the preservation of the environment, along with the impartial enforcement of these laws. At heart, I'm a law-and-order advocate, and to me it is simply a matter of having the right laws and enforcing them. Currently, in the U.S. we are witnessing both the absence of necessary laws and a reduced emphasis on supporting the public good.

I am almost old enough to remember the privations that people suffered in England during and after World War II. When there were food shortages, people accepted rationing and grew their own vegetables when possible, without making a fuss. In the U.S. during the Great Depression, people met with privations far more severe than they have in recent years, and there was little sign of a revolt. This has caused me to think of modern Westerners as whiny spoiled brats. The phenomenon is currently showing up in the anti-vax movement. It is difficult for me to imagine a convincing justification for their actions. We have a situation in which a pandemic is killing people and adversely affecting world economies, and people are facing greater economic hardship. There are free vaccines that have been proven effective and are available to everyone. The anti-vaxers are both encouraging the spread of the coronavirus and disrupting their economies, and they are not offering an intelligible rationale for their behavior. In my view, the anti-vaxers who riot and block bridges ought to be arrested, because they are acting against the public interest without any mitigating circumstances.

Actually, in a sense I am an advocate of totalitarian regimes, and, for me, we are going through an interesting period in which we have an opportunity to compare and assess the efficacy of both totalitarian and democratic regimes. In the West, I think that the Internet, along with ineffectual political leadership, have already seriously damaged a system that was once capable of sustaining and protecting the inhabitants. The Internet itself is rather innocuous, and the difficulties that it has created result mainly from the fact that it transmits multiple ideologies and worldviews, which have not been filtered or edited, resulting in a large assortment of incompatible worldviews within the population of each country. When you consider that humans are fundamentally irrational, this is a perfect scenario for the breakdown of society into cult-like groups which understand neither themselves nor other groups and may even inhabit fantasy worlds (see "Pizzagate"). The existing totalitarian regimes now have a significant advantage if they can both sidestep democratic processes and filter alternate worldviews from their Internet services, while also meeting the needs of their citizens.

Although I'm obviously not an expert on Russia, I don't think that its political model is sustainable. Vladimir Putin is essentially a dictator backed up by a powerful group of oligarchs. Russia's economy is not diverse compared to that of Europe, which means that it can never generate comparable wealth. Add to this the fact that Putin and the oligarchs are probably hoarding much of the wealth, and that the Internet also works against them, Putin's days seem numbered. At the moment, he is reflexively bullying his neighbors because of political weakness in both Europe and the U.S., but he has no discernible end game and no suitable replacement for himself. If he doesn't trigger a nuclear war, history will see him as an insignificant Cold War carryover.

I am also not a sinologist, but I think that the outcome in China will be far more consequential. Xi Jinping resembles a dictator, but he is operating in a political system that is quite different from that of Russia. If he is corrupt at all, it is at a much lower level than that of Vladimir Putin. He has also led a campaign to root out corruption. As I said earlier, I don't think that Western individualism ever caught on in China, and it is possible that Xi is actually working for the good of the people. Westerners collectively get upset about China's treatment of the Uyghurs, but Xi's strategy for dealing with them may be justifiable. In China "the people" is a meaningful concept, unlike the U.S., where it has never been more than part of convenient political slogans. I'll allow that Xi and his government may be overreacting to the problems that Islamic groups have caused elsewhere over the last few decades. In any case, the main advantage of totalitarian regimes is that they can use brute force and take immediate actions to correct perceived risks. The question is whether an action is appropriate and whether it entails corruption of any kind. My view is that "the people" are paramount, and that it is the duty of the government to protect them, even when that requires the curtailment of a minority group. Also, I might note that the Uyghurs as a group are not universally discriminated against in China; we know a Chinese Uyghur who is a student at Middlebury College and whose father is a successful executive in the oil industry. 

My impression of China is that it is more amenable to a cooperative mindset than most Western countries. This is partly the result of ancient social conditioning and partly the result of exposure to decades of communist propaganda. As in the West, China is vulnerable to ideological intrusions from the Internet, but there is little sign, except in Hong Kong, that protest is widespread. The potential problem for Xi Jinping would be to make missteps that cause dissent in pockets of Chinese society. At this stage, protest is hardly evident, and Xi could be given credit for controlling the COVID-19 outbreak better than any Western country. If Xi is also able to maintain economic stability over the next few years, he could become more respected than any Western leaders have been since World War II. I am a little suspicious of his current alliance with Vladimir Putin, but it is possible that it is merely a case of short-term political expediency. As a new phase in my interest in governance by artificial general intelligence, I am imagining Xi as a robot that is controlled by AGI and becomes the world leader without anyone suspecting that it isn't human.

Regardless of my speculations on China, I think that the political situation in the West is beginning to look dire. Political leaders here are increasingly forced to solicit campaign money from corporations, which don't generally act in the public interest, while at the same time soliciting votes from an uninformed public that is being barraged with misinformation. It is possible that Western governments will address the divisive effects of the Internet, but it seems unlikely that that will occur soon, because, in the U.S., Congress currently can barely even agree to continue funding the government. 

Obituaries

 While I no longer generally attempt to contact people whom I used to know, I still look some of them up occasionally to see what they're up to. Since I've never had many friends over the years, these are usually people whom I knew through work. What I'm finding now is that a lot of them are dead, and they now appear in obituaries. Most of the people whom I knew in the Chicago area, where I lived from 1998 to 2011, are still alive and working, but before that, when I lived in Dixon, Illinois, Louisville, Kentucky, Indianapolis, Indiana and Terre Haute, Indiana, most of them are dead. Since I still have vivid memories of them, it is a little jarring to think that they died so soon. On the other hand, this provides a broad perspective on people's lives which can only be accrued over many years.

The main feeling that I have now is that the work environment for most people is completely haphazard. They are thrown into groups of other people with whom they have little in common, and everyone pretends to fit the mold set by the management. As an independent person, I always found the pressure to conform grating, and as a perceptive person I was annoyed by the disingenuous behavior of others who were attempting to sustain or advance their careers. Another thing that I've noticed over many years is that some companies are conspicuously better managed than others, and that some have incompetent employees at high levels. Thinking about my supervisors, some were indelibly affected by their military experiences, and they used a primitive chain-of-command methodology throughout their working years. Thus, they spent more time on homage and fealty to their superiors and maintaining the status quo than on solving problems and ensuring higher productivity or improving the quality of work. In my experience, the military style failed, and the companies that followed it were more likely to go out of business. Interestingly, military thinking also fails inside its original settings, thus the conspicuous mismanagement of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and the disastrous psychological and medical consequences for veterans.

In some ways it seems remarkable that I survived in the workplace for so many years, but a lot of that may simply have had to do with changing jobs and moving. Certainly I never came remotely close to finding an ideal job, thus, I am happier than ever to be retired now. I feel sorry for those I knew who still have to work: I don't see how they could be enjoying themselves.

As for my former superiors, some were better than others. Larry, the president of the company where I worked in Dixon, often said "life is short." It was for him: he died at the age of 79 from Alzheimer's disease in 2015. Another boss, Fred, from Indianapolis, immigrated from England in 1972 and was far less talented. He died at the age of 81, leaving seven grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. Although Fred never achieved much, I guess you could say that he succeeded biologically. I think that he took early retirement when the company where he worked was sold. Several of my coworkers have also died, and some of them have changed fields. One became a bus driver, and another switched from printing to orthopedic products. Some have changed jobs several times since I last saw them. As far as I know, none have died from COVID-19.

One thing I'm thankful for is that I retired before I had to post an obligatory profile on LinkedIn. I would have found that completely degrading, because it would have been about as far from how I see myself as is possible. I think that this blog comes much closer to saying who I am and what I represent. So, if you would like to consider hiring me for a job, please read the blog carefully.

The obituaries themselves usually supply only the most basic information. However, you can sometimes tell how important that person was to others in the comments they write – if there are any. After reading many obituaries, an individual's life, in the greater scheme of things, does not seem to have much significance. As I've said, it's only a matter of time before everyone is forgotten. As for myself, I don't intend to have an obituary.

The Sociology of Philosophy II

In my post on this subject last year, I gave my impressions of the field as I experienced it, mostly well in the past. After reading about Bertrand Russell, I thought I'd add a few comments. Ray Monk's biography, I think, is protective of philosophy, though he seems to have had an unspecified animus toward Russell. Alternatively, I think that he is a little too lenient with Wittgenstein, both in the Russell biography and in the earlier Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. This is interesting, because Monk, who is ostensibly a philosopher, may have hidden agendas in his biographies of both Russell and Wittgenstein. I don't think that I have enough information to sort this out clearly, but I would at least like to write down a few thoughts on the matter.

If you have read much of this blog, you will have noticed that I enjoy looking at the underlying psychology of individuals and pondering how they attempt to construct careers in whatever field they undertake. I had never read much of Russell, because his primary work was done in the early 20th century and was not generally studied in philosophy departments when I was in college. Russell was just a popular writer then, and I never paid much attention to him, so Monk's unflattering exposé didn't surprise me much. However, I did read Wittgenstein in college, and, in the interim, Monk's glowing biography of him. Now that I think Wittgenstein wasn't that great either, it seems appropriate to untangle the sociological context of this situation.

I found little to disagree with in the Russell biography, except that Monk probably gave Russell more credit than he deserved. He let the reader believe that Gödel didn't refute Russell's main thesis and even suggested that Russell's work eventually led to the work of Alan Turing, hence, modern computers. As far as I am able to ascertain, this is hyperbole. Monk's earlier biography of Wittgenstein is comparatively glowing and has contributed to Wittgenstein's fame right up to the present. Since it is of no interest to me to reread Wittgenstein and assess his ideas now, I'll just say that I see no evidence that they are or ever were of much importance. Long ago, I also read Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, by the philosopher, Norman Malcolm, which contributed to some of the early mystique surrounding Wittgenstein. In that book, Malcolm enthusiastically describes Wittgenstein's visit to Cornell in 1949. I was surprised when I later read that Richard Feynman, who also happened to be at Cornell in 1949, though not while Wittgenstein was visiting, specifically thought that the people in the philosophy department there were a bunch of idiots. Freeman Dyson, the physicist who worked with Feynman, knew Wittgenstein at Cambridge and later made unflattering comments about him. 

In the case of Wittgenstein, it is clear that he was mythologized and had a cult following for a few years, but I am now more inclined to go with the opinions of the physicists, though they would not have been familiar with his ideas. My point is that you can look at most thinkers – in this instance Russell or Wittgenstein – and see how their professional reputations were determined less by objective intellectual standards than by vague sociological factors such as Russell's aristocratic standing and Wittgenstein's fan base. Biographers also play into this, with Monk serving as an advocate of Wittgenstein and, for the most part, a detractor of Russell, at least with respect to his personal conduct.

Most of this is fairly obvious in many domains of life, and if you look at the history of ideas, it is not uncommon to find that some of them can be popular when there is no substantive basis for their support. The funny thing about Wittgenstein's popularity is that his ideas exist almost outside the history of philosophy – they had no precedent, and they have not produced any legacy. In other words, they depended on an ephemeral set of circumstances in a specific academic environment. Also, much of Wittgenstein's popularity today can be attributed to Monk's biography, which is what Monk is best known for.

As I mentioned in one of my posts on the Russell biography, Monk overlooked the fact that Wittgenstein was probably autistic, in the negative sense that autism influenced his ideas and probably made them unintelligible to non-autistic people. Monk was therefore not doing philosophy a service by canonizing Wittgenstein. Academia typically handles problems like this by allowing specialists within a department to hold positions which are incompatible; if you disagree with the ideas of one scholar in your department, you may simply hold a different position, study different works and never engage or reconcile. This is especially common in the humanities, where popularity can easily override objectivity. A similar situation exists now in economics departments, with some economists supporting the traditional rational agent model, with efficient markets, and others supporting behavioral economics, which focuses on human irrationality. The two theories are incompatible. There are no true gatekeepers in academia, which explains how certain ideas and fads can run out of control, and strange phenomena such as political correctness can take root.

The Sociology of Philosophy I

I had been hoping to start a new book by now, but it's coming from England and hasn't arrived yet. Therefore, I've decided to write a little about the sociology of philosophy, which falls within the broader topic of the sociology of academia and resembles the sociology of creative writing programs, which I touched upon earlier. I'm not primarily interested in the content of the academic fields discussed, and for me this is a more general analysis of human behavior in academic settings. The reason why I'm writing about philosophy is that I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate and attended graduate school briefly. This is not a topic that I would ordinarily think about much now, but I occasionally look at 3 Quarks Daily in search of new reading materials, and S. Abbas Raza, the editor, has a graduate degree in philosophy and likes to include articles by philosophers. I usually skip them, but occasionally I read ones by Justin E.H. Smith, and this keeps me peripherally aware of the field. I have also occasionally viewed videos or listened to podcasts with Daniel Dennett and Massimo Pigliucci, two other philosophers whom Raza likes.

This subject goes way back for me, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I became interested in philosophy and why I eventually became disillusioned with it. I think many people enter the field of philosophy because they have broad interests stretching from mathematical and scientific areas to literature and the arts, and they don't want to specialize and become scientists, engineers, writers or artists. This is the kind of information that never presents itself directly to you, and you have to sort it out by yourself over many years. After thinking about it for a long time, I decided that my undergraduate philosophy department faculty included a few confused pastors. In the four years that I spent there, no one told me that the only tenured faculty had studied theology at some point in their educations. They were good students who initially thought that they would become clergymen; most of them ended up attending divinity school and subsequently got Ph.D.'s in philosophy. Thus, through a series of unpredictable events, they became philosophy professors at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. I don't think that any of them were talented at philosophy, and it seems that they came to it by accident. Because of this, they were unable to deal with philosophy majors who had no interest in theology.  My own background was quite different, and I simply liked the college environment, wasn't a particularly good student and didn't want to specialize. I certainly had no interest in theology. By the time I arrived in graduate school, philosophy seemed like pointless rote learning centered on the writings of mediocre thinkers. This thought was completely beyond the scope of my undergraduate professors.

Just to give an example, let me repeat what I said earlier about moral philosophy, which, in my experience, is a complete waste of time. If you study it, you may learn about Kant's categorical imperative. I have concluded that it is nothing more than a warmed-over version of the golden rule, which has been around since the Bible. I now think that more headway was made by E.O. Wilson, the entomologist, than moral philosophers were able to make collectively over thousands of years. This was simply the identification of humans as a eusocial species and the establishment of a connection between moral behavior and DNA. A lot of what passes for philosophy is simply an extension of theological reasoning dating from the Middle Ages. In the case of morality and ethics, I think it best to start from scratch and begin with human genetic predispositions, because without them we wouldn't have any moral tendencies. Wilson himself has little interest in this field, and the task is left to others.

Another example of why I dislike philosophy is the case of Daniel Dennett. On the surface you would think that I would find him appealing, because he is very science-oriented and his theories are more empirical than those of most philosophers. However, I attended one of his lectures several years ago and found him to be a windbag. He has an excellent academic background and is extremely knowledgeable, but he hasn't really developed a distinctive worldview that might differentiate him from an ordinary scientist. Unfortunately, Dennett tows the line as an academic philosopher and spouts faddish philosophical terms such as "qualia," which strikes me as slightly idiotic. I find that philosophers habitually obfuscate fairly straightforward scientific ideas, and that it is better to go directly to the science. In this vein, I'm also unhappy with Justin E.H. Smith, who is one of the most elegant philosophical writers you're likely to come across, but whose writings never seem to have any practical applications; I see him more as an entertaining writer than as a substantive one. I am guessing that he drifted into philosophy because he liked to write, but writing alone does not make a good philosopher, and he consistently lacks the depth of a serious thinker.

Perhaps the person whose life best sums up my thoughts on philosophy is Ludwig Wittgenstein. He came from a wealthy Viennese family and had wide cultural exposure. For example, one of his sisters posed for Gustav Klimt. His interests tended to be technical, and first he tried aeronautical engineering and later architecture. Somehow he became interested in mathematical logic and found himself working with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. By then, Russell was already getting tired of philosophy and was happy to unload his research on Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's work was initially an odd combination of logic and mysticism, but after World War I and a stint as a schoolteacher in rural Austria it propelled him to rock-star status at Cambridge. However, as time passed, Wittgenstein increasingly became impatient with his philosophy colleagues, and his focus changed from logic to ordinary language. By the time of his death in 1951 he was recommending other fields, such as medicine, to his students. In my view, Wittgenstein was a frustrated artist, and none of his ideas are likely to be of lasting significance. I think that the same can be said of most philosophical ideas, and that the most durable ideas come from science. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with pursuing most academic fields, but that philosophy as an academic discipline has little to offer anyone.

My conclusion on academic philosophy is therefore much the same as my conclusion on creative writing programs. Yes, students can enroll in these courses and learn something, but they could just as well do something else and might end up happier. I see colleges and universities as economic entities in which the tenured faculty usually get good salaries and favorable working conditions while the students, particularly in fashionable subjects, may come away with nothing. I mean this not in the sense that the students are out a few dollars, but that the actual value of the education, in both technical and personal senses, can be quite low. Given my experience, it surprises me that intelligent people can still think that academic philosophy could be of value to anyone. The convoluted thinking that you have to go through just to make sense of it would drive most people mad.

Population: The Current State and Future Prospects

This is one of fourteen essays in Biological Extinction and was written by John Bongaarts. The essay is so comprehensive and succinct that I thought I would at least summarize it, because it presents in clear terms the current status and future trends in global population, and because this perspective is a good one for discussing major policy issues, though it does not extend into related areas such as climate change or geopolitics. Bongaarts is a demographer, and I found it interesting to see how regional population levels are framed by fertility rates related to relative degrees of participation in the Industrial Revolution.

Until modern times, women typically had six or seven children, and, because of diseases, famines, wars and infant mortality, the average life expectancy was thirty. When the Industrial Revolution occurred, life expectancies increased due to improved health and resources, and, with the introduction of women to the workforce, less time became available for childrearing. Eventually, with improved contraception methods, women chose to have fewer children, which allowed them to work and have greater control over their lives. What is interesting is that all regions are following a similar curve in which less-developed regions gradually reduce their fertility rates as their economies come to resemble more-developed regions. In the most-developed regions, the number of children per woman approaches two, and in some countries it has even fallen below that, meaning that, without immigration, their populations will decline.

While the world population increased only from about one billion in 1800 to about 2.3 billion in 1950, most of the world was still undeveloped in 1950, which helps explain why the population has since increased to about 7.7 billion – in just 69 years. Currently, the number of births per woman is slightly below two in Europe, about two in North America, slightly higher in Latin America and Asia and about five in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Thus, although population growth is approaching stability in most of the world, in Sub-Saharan Africa the number of children per woman will still be about three in 2050, which constitutes a continuing population explosion. Current estimates indicate that in 2100, the world population will be 11.21 billion, with 9.94 billion people in less-developed regions and 1.28 billion people in more-developed regions. The population of Sub-Saharan Africa will jump from .96 billion to 4.39 billion.

Bongaarts also mentions changes such as increased urbanization and problems associated with ageing populations. The former will put greater pressures on cities, while rural areas will stabilize. The latter will result in reduced workforces and insufficient resources to support the elderly. Healthcare and retirement systems will increasingly come under pressure, and this is already occurring in countries such as Japan and Italy, which have the lowest fertility rates.

Finally, Bongaarts discusses the importance of family planning from a policy standpoint. Family planning is an effective tool for reducing population increases in less-developed regions, where many women are not aware of their options. He concludes by saying:

Assisting couples to achieve their reproductive preferences is a compassionate act that promotes responsible parenthood and improves the lives of women, their children and their communities, especially among the poor and most vulnerable sections of society. The resulting decline in unplanned births also enhances prospects for poverty reduction and moderates the increasingly harmful impact of human activities on the natural environment.

I appreciated this essay because it concisely states the pertinent facts of population growth and touches on some of the policy measures that can be taken to alleviate increasing pressures. Often, population growth is discussed in far more nebulous terms, and it is less apparent that actions can be taken that affect future outcomes. Perhaps I like the essay because the framework falls within my preferred worldview, which emphasizes the biological aspects of mankind and rejects most ideology. I think there are several equally informative essays in this book, and I intend to discuss them separately.

Stupidity

As I've mentioned before, the time lag between the announcement of new scientific findings and their assimilation by the public is often astoundingly long. In the extreme case, you have the works of Charles Darwin. His main ideas have been confirmed repeatedly, and they have been widely accepted by educated people for over a century. Yet, here in the U.S., about a third of the population still supports Creationism, depending on how the questions are asked. Creationism is dying out here, but it may end up taking a total of two hundred years, despite the mountains of evidence against it. As I've also mentioned previously, there seems to be a time lag between the announcements of the recent findings of Daniel Kahneman, Steven Sloman, Philip Fernbach and Robert Sapolsky and their acceptance within the public sphere. They don't even seem to be percolating within the intellectual community at the moment. Tangentially, the works of Robert Plomin and David Reich, which provide insights into the genetic nature of human aptitudes and their unequal distribution within the overall population, seem buried in the media, perhaps because they conflict with some of the central tenets of political correctness. The picture that has emerged from recent research is that people don't think clearly most of the time or know as much as they think they do. There is nothing that can be done about it because this is how their brains work.

A related topic that isn't exactly a discrete field is groupthink within academic disciplines. The phenomenon demonstrates that even groups of people don't necessarily think clearly. Groupthink has been studied for many years in business settings, but it occurs everywhere, including in academia. Thomas Piketty touches on this in Capital, and may have been the first to criticize the overemphasis on mathematical models in economics. Sabine Hossenfelder has a similar message in Lost in Math, which accuses physicists of wasting time on untestable mathematical models when the real problem may be a lack of new data. From an institutional point of view, mathematically-oriented physics researchers offer the major benefit of not having to purchase expensive research equipment. This strategy may work in the short-term, but more fundamentally it may be a misallocation of resources. Then there is the closed culture of MFA programs and their stranglehold on what counts as literary writing. I have seen some criticism of that system, but it remains intact. My point here is that even highly-educated groups make collective cognitive errors – these are the most likely to escape scrutiny, yet Piketty and Hossenfelder have had the courage to call out the leaders of their fields.

The basic insight one gets from surveying the research is that no groups are immune to a variety of cognitive failures, thus, whatever principles a group claims to uphold, and no matter how competent they may seem to outsiders, behind the scenes, the prejudices and cognitive limitations of individuals are what actually drive practices and policies. In economics and physics, the accumulation of new data became secondary to mathematical modeling. In MFA programs, departments became vulnerable to the preferences of their faculties: the criteria for good literary writing can easily be distorted by the faculty. As I've said ad nauseum, the result has been that MFA writing is now at best forgettable, to put it politely. Nevertheless, MFA writers do well as a cult through their strategic use of self-congratulatory propaganda. It is customary to compare individuals to assess their competence, but comparable variation can be found between groups, and it is a mistake to think that the best-credentialed groups are the most competent.

Of course, these problems in academia are not really that important in the greater scheme of things. I remain astounded by the resilience of Donald Trump as a public figure. In a recent review of a biography of P.T. Barnum, Elizabeth Kolbert writes:

Barnum became one of the most celebrated men in America not despite his bigotry and duplicity, his flimflamming and self-dealing, but because of them. He didn't so much fool the public as indulge it....he turned P.T. Barnum into yet another relentlessly promoted exhibit—the Greatest Showman on Earth. Americans, he knew, were drawn to such humbug. Why they are still being drawn to it is a puzzle that, now more than ever, demands our attention.

The problems of the Trump presidency are as obvious as one could hope. My only criticism of Kolbert's innuendo is that the information needed to answer her question is already available: people are stupid. It seems as if the last hurdle before order can be brought to civilization is the recognition that, although we're smarter than chimpanzees, we're often quite stupid. The research I've alluded to unequivocally supports this position. The stupidity applies to all level of society, though people who are perceived to be successful usually get a free pass. It may be that, at an instinctive level, Trump supporters recognize a fellow ignoramus who has been successful and can dominate and humiliate smarter people if he likes. Trump supporters get a perverse satisfaction from seeing him thumb his nose at the establishment, which they feel has neglected them and reduced their social rank. Trump is uplifting for them because he normalizes inarticulateness and ignorance. Actually, this is a very old problem, one that thinkers have pondered for hundreds of years. Jean-Jacques Rousseau recognized that most people are unqualified to vote. He preferred a more patrician model in which only a few educated people without private ambitions or agendas would be permitted to vote. The Founding Fathers attempted to put in safeguards to prevent mob rule, but the gradual elimination of restrictions on voting and the expansion of the electorate have rendered it more difficult than ever to screen out incompetent politicians from public elections.

Kolbert, like many journalists, recognizes that Trump appeals to the worst instincts of the public. Fortunately, he can never be a popular president, and only about forty percent of voters will continue to support him. The underlying problem, which Kolbert and most journalists avoid discussing at all costs, is that at some point the public must be implicated as part of the problem. The fact that such suggestions would be labeled as elitist doesn't subtract from their truth. Thus, Kolbert, a science writer, whom one would assume is familiar with the research I've cited, is not exactly taking a heroic stance. This brings me back to my criticism of Michiko Kakutani, who, I said, was constrained by the requirements of her publisher, a corporation. There is an implicit "never bite the hand that feeds you" rule in journalism. From a journalistic standpoint, the conflict between free speech and corporate interests is almost always resolved in favor of corporations. There is no marketplace of ideas when so many of them are repressed from the start. Criticism of the public, even when it is deserved, rarely makes it into the media. When it does occur, it is usually only part of Donald Trump's ugly, worn-out business and political strategy.

If one were serious about preventing a recurrence of the Trump phenomenon, one would have to look at changing the democratic process. Trump was elected with the twenty-first century equivalent of the nineteenth-century practice of handing out free beer at rallies. Democracy, though it is preferable to autocracy in most cases, is not a good system for promoting competent political leaders. We are stuck with the worst president in American history only because a minority of the population was willing to set aside reason for a few feel-good moments. It is an unsubstantiated myth that "the voice of the people" will always correct political errors. Moreover, the freedom of individuals, as understood by most Americans, is not a sustainable idea. The U.S. is like a casino in which everyone feels entitled to a piece of the action. The American acceptance of capitalism is so deeply ingrained that alternatives are unthinkingly seen as heretical.

Much as I try to avoid it, I always circle back to the same conclusion: that the best hope lies in removing the public from a decision-making role in many if not most instances. The important problems facing Americans (and the world) are so complex that they may be beyond the comprehension of even the most experienced politicians. If anything, a mechanism is needed to prevent the public from guaranteeing a dysfunctional government in the future. In my view, the competent elite of the future will be AI, and it is already apparent that this needs looking into. I would be surprised if people in the distant future were not amazed that we were able to survive this long stretch of political turmoil with nothing more to help us than our chaotic little animal brains.