It’s commonly believed that money doesn’t buy happiness. Sure, we’re happier for a while after a new purchase, but it wears off. We re-normalize back to our baseline level of happiness.

While this is probably not true (richer countries are happier than poorer ones), even if it were, it still doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t strive to become wealthier. To make that inference, you’d have to hold that temporary happiness is worthless and only long-lasting happiness matters. But temporary happiness is valuable and desirable. Even if we’re stuck on a “hedonic treadmill”, we can still get happiness from running.

There’s a direct parallel to the free market system. Entrepreneurs innovate in order to reap profits, but competition always eats away those profits. Profits are always temporary, lasting only as long as it takes for competitors to enter the market. Yet these fleeting profits still provide a powerful motivation for entrepreneurs. Likewise, fleeting happiness is still happiness and still worth pursuing.

So if money buys temporary happiness, and temporary happiness improves our quality of life, then it follows that economic progress matters. And since the level of economic progress depends on how free the market is, economic liberalization is the only way to go.

The most common objection to the logic of evolutionary health is that paleolithic humans had short lifespans, presumably because they were in poor health.  This fallacy has been demolished many times over, but I have another argument to add to the pile. The popular notion that paleolithic humans lived long enough to reproduce then died is flatly contradicted by the existence of evolved grandparenting behavior.

Grandparenting behavior seems to be a cultural universal. Parents want their grown children to produce offspring, and they seem to care a lot about it. Grandparents enjoy lavishing their love on their grandchildren. The grandmother on the mothers’s side tends to invest a lot in helping out with the baby (for good evolutionary reasons).

This implies that these behaviors have evolved, which in turn means that grandparents must have had a sizable impact on their grandchildrens’s genetic success. So it must have been fairly common for people to live long enough to become grandparents. Conclusion: paleolithic humans routinely lived long enough to see their grandchildren grow up. They lived long enough to reproduce and see their children reproduce.

So how old would that have been? A conservative estimate would be that the grandparent had their child at 16 and this child had the grandchild at 16 as well. The grandparent would be 32 at the birth of the grandchild. Since grandparenting behavior extends past infancy, let’s take a conservative estimate of 4 years. So we can expect that it was common for our paleolithic ancestors to live at least to 36.

Taking a more realistic estimate, we could assume that the average age of childbirth is 22 and that grandparents were around until their grandchildren were on average 6 years old. That brings the figure up to 50. And an average age of 50 is nothing to scoff at. I’m not sure how late the evolved grandparenting behaviors last, so 6 is still a conservative figure. In fact, with generations of 16 years, one could be a great-grandparent at 48.

Just another argument that puts the lie to the notion of a short-lived paleolithic ancestry.

Long live paleo man!

I couldn’t find much on this topic in the paleosphere, so here’s an initial attempt at a paleo approach to parenting. I’m not a parent, but I think the basic ideas are simple enough.

The leading candidate for a primal infant care manual is Jean Liedloff’s 1975 book, The Continuum Concept. Based on her observations while living with hunter-gatherers, she recommends following the evolutionary logic. From the website:

• constant physical contact with his mother (or another familiar caregiver as needed) from birth;
• sleeping in his parents’ bed, in constant physical contact, until he leaves of his own volition (often about two years);
• breastfeeding “on cue” — nursing in response to his own body’s signals;
• being constantly carried in arms or otherwise in contact with someone, usually his mother, and allowed to observe (or nurse, or sleep) while the person carrying him goes about his or her business — until the infant begins creeping, then crawling on his own impulse, usually at six to eight months;
• having caregivers immediately respond to his signals (squirming, crying, etc.), without judgment, displeasure, or invalidation of his needs, yet showing no undue concern nor making him the constant center of attention;
• sensing (and fulfilling) his elders’ expectations that he is innately social and cooperative and has strong self-preservation instincts, and that he is welcome and worthy.

This is in contrast to mainstream practices such as: formula-feeding, leaving the infant alone to sleep, leaving the infant to cry.

Another valuable resource is the work of Judith Rich Harris. In her paradigm-shifting book, The Nurture Assumption, she convincingly argues that parents have no effect on how their childrens’ personalities will turn out. (The evidence shows that half of the variation in personality is due to genetics, the other half to the influence of the peer group.) She concludes that the Western obsession with nurturing children is a big fat waste of time. Since personality is immune to parental nurture, parents can breathe a collective sigh of relief—no longer are they to blame for their childrens’ failures. Nor do they have to worry that they aren’t spending enough “quality time” with their children, giving them enough affection, driving them to sports practices and music lessons, etc. Children turn out fine so long as they have a peer group.

This agrees perfectly with the anthropological evidence. In hunter-gatherer cultures, infants stay in their mothers’ arms until they are weaned. The mother doesn’t bother to speak to her infant as it wouldn’t be able to understand (and it will learn to speak from other children). Then, the toddler is handed over to an older sibling, usually a sister, who is given full responsibility over the child and is expected to dominate it. The parents play a very hands-off role. Harris writes:

The idea that parents should have to entertain their children is bizarre to people in [traditional] societies. They would fall down laughing if you tried to tell them about “quality time”.

There is a good reason why this trait evolved in children. Parents and children only share half of their genes, so from the selfish gene’s perspective, there are conflicts of interest. We would expect parents and children to try to manipulate each other for their own benefit, and that each would develop defenses against such manipulation. The child may try to get more than its fair share of food by crying, whining, being cute, etc. (It only shares half its genes with its siblings, after all.) The parents may want their daughter to stick around and take care of her younger siblings, while it may not be in her own best interest to do so. Hence children resist the efforts of their parents to shape their personalities.

Harris’s advice to parents is simple: 1) follow the evolutionary logic (i.e., don’t bother with obsessive nurturing), and 2) raise them in a good neighborhood, where there is a good peer group. Children are socialized by their peer group, so this is the most effective thing you can do for them.

Finally, when it comes to health, paleolithic nutrition is the most important element. For an infant, this means breast milk and then paleo foods. Please—don’t feed your baby soy formula. Sun is also important: it’s a tragedy that so many people shield their babies from getting any direct sunlight on their skin.

I just finished reading Steven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate. I must say that I underestimated it, despite having high expectations. Pinker draws from an impressive range of disciplines, drawing many important insights.

Pinker invokes evolutionary psychology and the other sciences of human nature to systematically pick apart the Blank Slate. The Blank Slate is the empiricist position that the mind enters the world empty and acquires all traits from the environment—hence, the mind can be shaped into whatever we desire simply by controlling the environment; there is no such thing as human nature. In the nature/nurture debate, it is known as the extreme nurture position. Pinker decisively shows that this position is false. The mind comes with many innate features such as emotions, a moral sense, and a highly specialized ability to learn language (but not to read/write), just to name a few. The existence of cultural universals seals the fate of the Blank Slate.

While all of this is quite evident to most people, many intellectuals (especially in the social sciences) have bitterly resisted the discoveries of innate features. They fear that a scientific basis for differences among people, the sexes, and races will legitimize discrimination. Their error was to base their morality on the assumption that humans are born blank slates. As such, their moral opposition to discrimination is deeply undermined by the discovery of facts about human nature. In fact, the Blank Slate position could just as easily be invoked to argue that people should just be socialized to accept discrimination. A proper moral theory holds that people have equal rights by the fact that they are humans, regardless of their innate features. Likewise, the recognition of human nature fatally undermines such garbage philosophies as relativism, constructionism, and romanticism.

He explores the implications of various innate features of the mind, such as our intuitive moral sense or our intuitive theory of mind. His analysis of our innate theory of economics explains why economic fallacies are so common among non-economists (and even among some economists). Paul Rubin has written an excellent paper about this and draws heavily on Pinker’s book. I highly recommend it.

To his credit, Pinker takes a mature classical liberal position on social issues. In the chapter on politics, he rejects the Utopian (i.e., Marxist) position for its naive view that human nature can be fundamentally changed. He sides instead with the classical liberals, who recognize the flaws of human nature and the need for institutions that can deal with them (e.g., limited democratic government, low taxation, free markets). On the topic of feminism, he sides with the equity feminists (those who advocate political equality between men and women) in rejecting gender feminism (which he calls the “lunatic fringe” of feminism).

One of the interesting topics he discusses is child development.  Contrary to common belief, parents have virtually no influence on how their children turn out (personality, intelligence). This is explained by the evolutionary theory of parent-child conflict—children only carry 50% of a parent’s genes so their interests are not fully consonant; children evolved resistance to parental influence to prevent parental exploitation.  Scientists have found that about 50% of what shapes a person is genetic. The other 50% is attributable to interaction with peers and chance. For example, the children of immigrants seamlessly learn the language and adopt the culture, but they don’t acquire their parents’ accents. This explains why children don’t turn out as their parents worked so hard to ensure. It also entails that most parenting advice is trash that wastes parents’ time and makes them feel guilty for not investing all their efforts in raising their children.

Pinker’s discussion of the arts is great. He shows that humans are hardwired to enjoy specific features in art (form, beauty, melody, etc). But in the 20th century, modernism and post-modernism explicitly rejected beauty and deliberately created appalling and disgusting art in attempt to change human nature. Hence the sorry state of modern art, and the superiority of classical art.

All in all, it’s a fascinating book with broad implications. Pinker’s analyses are careful and intelligent, brimming with good sense. The book is well worth reading, and you will learn a lot in a variety of fields.

I recently read Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts on Dr. Eades’s recommendation. The book centers on cognitive dissonance theory (read this link for a good overview), which is ripe with insights into why people hold irrational beliefs. The essence of the theory is that when people are confronted with dissonant beliefs such as “I’m a good, smart person” and “I just made a bad mistake,” they tend to rationalize the latter so that the former is not undermined. Such a person might convince himself that it wasn’t a mistake, or that somebody else was responsible for it. Likewise, when people with poor self-esteem do something good, they tend to rationalize it away, e.g., “It would have happened without me anyways.” This rationalizing process can take someone step-by-step to the point of justifying things that they would have considered crazy at the outset.

A good example is the Milgram Experiment: the volunteers proceeded to deliver more and more powerful “shocks” (up to what they believed were dangerous levels) because they justified it one shock at a time. Once they had delivered the first shock, it wasn’t a big leap to justify giving the second shock, nor the third, and so on. But if they stopped for fear of harming the person, they would have to justify the previous few shocks, which weren’t much weaker. They faced the dissonance of admitting that they were wrong to be giving the shocks in the first place, which is why many people rationalized the shocks and continued as instructed. (Interestingly, this suggests that it was the incremental nature of the process that led so many to deliver dangerous shocks, and not just obedience to an authority figure, as commonly believed. Had the authority figure ordered the volunteers to deliver a dangerous shock right from the start, a lot more of them would have refused because they wouldn’t have had any dissonance to resolve.)

Confirmation bias plays an important role in rationalizing our beliefs, allowing us to discount or ignore disconfirming evidence and focus on the confirming evidence. People can become entrenched in the craziest beliefs via this process of step-by-step justification with confirmation bias, e.g., flat-earthers, vegetarians, and religious people. Take vegetarianism: let’s say you object to the cruel treatment of animals on factory farms. From there, it’s only a small step to the belief that killing animals is wrong. And from there, it’s a small step to the belief that eating meat is wrong. Confirmation bias smooths each step: you ignore or discount the counter-arguments and convince yourself with all the supporting arguments. Step-by-step, you slide further and further. By the end of the process, you’ve gone from the reasonable belief that animals shouldn’t be treated cruelly to the absurd belief that eating animals is unhealthy. The lesson here is that once we become committed to a belief, we become motivated to justify it. Confirmation bias helps smooth the process, and step-by-step we can end up strongly believing something that we previously would have considered ridiculous.

Cognitive dissonance theory offers some interesting practical advice. For instance, if you’re considering making a big purchase, don’t base your decision on the opinion of somebody who just made that purchase. They’ll be motivated to rationalize the purchase and you’ll tend to get biased advice. Another tip: if you want to win somebody’s friendship, get them to do a favor for you. They’ll be motivated to justify the favor by telling themselves that you’re a good person and you deserved it. Conversely, if you harm someone, you’ll be motivated to justify the harm by convincing yourself that the person deserved it. So venting your anger at someone is counter-productive: you’ll come to hate that person even more.

Cognitive dissonance theory has much to say about the mass delusions, which have the veneer of legitimacy because of their sheer number of believers. The main three are religion, statism, and mainstream health (or god, government, and grains.) To non-believers, these are completely loony beliefs that only persist because of cultural momentum. Because of this, a believer faces great dissonance in admitting that such beliefs are foolish. It would be very difficult for them to admit that their religion is nothing but a fairy tale; they would experience strong dissonance between “I’m intelligent and rational” and “I strongly believed in a fairy tale”. The dissonance would be even worse for intellectuals, who play a crucial role maintaining the legitimacy of widespread beliefs. To admit error is to admit that they misled countless people—a terrible thing to do—so there’s a strong motivation to rationalize the belief and convince themselves that they’re right. The dissonance becomes extreme in fields where the ideas have horrible real-world consequences, such as mainstream health or the social sciences. It would be extremely difficult to accept that “I promoted ideas that caused misery and deaths for countless people.” In these cases, the motivation to rationalize is tremendously powerful, which explains why conversions among these intellectuals are practically non-existent.

It’s important to understand this when working to explode mass delusions. Erroneous beliefs are rarely dropped right away—if they are at all, it’s often through a step-by-step reversal of the process that led there in the first place. One important conclusion we can draw is that if we want to convince someone of their error, we should respectfully and humbly point out their error. If we viciously attack their position as though only an idiot would believe it, then they face the dissonance of admitting that they strongly held an idiotic position and will be motivated to further entrench themselves in their position. Of course, we don’t always aim to convert the other person, in which case vicious attacks on their position can motivate other critics and win over undecided people. But when we really do want them to change their position, we would be wise to recognize that it will take time for them to correct their beliefs and that respectful criticism will go much further than head-on assault.

Perhaps most importantly, understanding cognitive dissonance theory can help us overcome our own biases and avoid the dangers of rationalization. The motivation to rationalize is quite difficult to escape, even for the authors of the book. We may always be susceptible, but we can protect ourselves by being aware of when we rationalize and stopping the process before it goes too far. It can be difficult and even humiliating to admit error, but a strong commitment to truth can provide the motivation. In the long run, a cultural shift in our attitudes towards mistakes would solve the bulk of the problem. If mistakes were considered normal and admission of error honorable, it would be much easier to admit error from the start, before rationalizing our way into delusion.