Every time I've ever taken the Myers-Briggs personality test, I've come up right smack in the middle of the Thinking/Feeling scale.* Generally very, very slightly more on the Thinking side of things. (If you aren't familiar with that test then this post won't make much sense.) Thinkers are supposed to make decisions based on what they think objectively, while Feelers are supposed to make decisions based on what they suspect will best contribute to social harmony, and correspondingly avoid what will lead to discord.**
Being in the middle means I don't really have a strong preference for either one, because the Myers-Briggs doesn't measure one's aptitude in deciding things rationally verses deciding them based on social concerns, it only measures which and to what degree one prefers. So I suppose I just don't care much either way, or I see the value in one or the other depending on the situation, etc.
One MBTI type-watching book that I read suggested that people who exert only the tiniest of preference one way, can sometimes find themselves in a state of confusion that makes them utterly incapable of using either preference effectively and act like the un-healthiest version of their opposite.
Whatever. Clearly one should learn not to nerd out so much to popularized psychology tests. Today I sure acted like an un-healthy Feeler, allowing a neighbor to convince me to put money into a communal service I didn't much think was necessary and consequently didn't much want to pay for. Yet I didn't want to be a free rider when many of the others on our street were volunteering to put money in to something I would benefit from even if I thought it wasn't required, and in the moment it seemed like the benefits of community solidarity and camaraderie were was worth a mere six bucks. Hell, maybe it even was, because I've always hated living in my little box and never even knowing who the people who lived in such proximity even were. Yet still, that the whole thing was not what I thought was necessary, I just did it anyway because that's someone who makes decision by Feeling does. Consequently, our street is allegedly going to get plowed tomorrow, despite the fact that I'd already contributed to community solidarity plenty by shoveling two tracks into most of it.
Ah well, if it snows another half a foot tonight, then I'll have made the right choice after all.
**An MBTI certified (apparently, you can do that) friend of mine once told me that women who test as only slight Thinkers or Feelers should look at their results with scrutiny, because we are socialized hardcore toward Feeling even if that isn't what we prefer. I couldn't say if men are equally pushed away from Feeling and toward Thinking, or if they just aren't actively pushed toward Feeling like women often are. Over-the-top displays of masculinity strike me more as Feeling decision than Thinking ones...but it's all just a model, anyway. Even if I have often found it useful in working with people whom I otherwise have a hard time understanding.
*For you type-watching nerds: INTJ. INFJ?
Showing posts with label those other sciences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label those other sciences. Show all posts
Monday, January 10, 2011
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Quantum Psychology
This link seems pretty high on the "woo woo stuff claiming to be science" scale--but that's the predjudice we physicists have toward psychologists anyway.
(That was a joke, you can stop throwing tomatoes now.)
Actually, I say why not, if other psychologists find it up to snuff, I see no reason why it's not an interesting and plausible study that is worth more research. To wit:
"One of the most respected, senior and widely published professors of psychology, Daryl Bem of Cornell, has just published an article that suggests that people — ordinary people — can be altered by experiences they haven't had yet. Time, he suggests, is leaking. The Future has slipped, unannounced, into the Present. And he thinks he can prove it."
Without claiming that this explains it, I will say that the framework of quantum mechanics would permit something like this to be within the realm of the possible, and our understanding of quantum mechanics is getting so good that I would not be terribly surprised if we did begin to see quantum effects appearing in realms of science even very removed from pure physics. That being said, actually linking the effects credibly would be beyond the scope of either branch of science individually and pretty damn difficult all around.
When I was an undergrad I performed a lab experiment called the "quantum eraser," in which I took the extraordinarily simple case of a beam of light emitted by a laser (thus, all the little light particles were suitably similar to each other as is unique to how lasers, masers, and the like emit light), and made the photons act a certain way based on what I did after the experiment was over.
It was called the "quantum eraser" because of what the laser light looked like on the wall, after I shone the laser beam through a screen with two slits. Usually, the light pattern looks something like this, which is notably different from the single dot of light your cat likes to chase across the floor. This laser dot looks like a prison window grill instead because when it passed through two slits, it interfered with itself. Bring up the usual analogy to dropping two rocks in a pond and watching how the ripple patterns change when they intersect each other: some places get extra big ripples, in some places the ripple goes away, and that's the beauty of things that are waves. Light is a wave, and it's also a particle--welcome to your very first step on the journey down the rabbit hole of quantum mechanics.
When I added in polarizers after each slit, so that light passing through one of the two slits could be distinguished from the light passing through the other one, I stopped seeing the prison-grill pattern and started seeing a normal dot of light again--I erased the pattern. But why should simply distinguishing the light from each beam do that? There is no reason that it should, except that quantum mechanics illogically says that in a situation such as each little light photon was supposed to have faced, whereby it arrives at Door #1 and Door #2 and has to pick one, but I, the observer, have no way of telling which one it actually picked, then it doesn't pick. It just behaves as if it went through both. Since it behaves that way, it can interfere with itself and make a light pattern that shows interference.
When I changed the experiment so that I could tell which slit the photons went through, then I observed what would happen if half had gone through one and half had gone through the other: just a dot, no interference. Furthermore the polarizers were located behind the slits: the light had already passed through by the time it reached them, yet being there, giving me the ability to tell what had happened, was enough. Even weirder, when I added in another polarizer downstream that erased the information the first polarizers had gathered--I'd see the stripes again, instead of the dot. All done after the light had gone and passed through the slits.
This is called delayed choice. One interpretation is that I can choose the outcome of the experiment based on what I want to observe, and it doesn't matter that I make that choice after the event I am observing actually happens. It doesn't necessarily make sense with how we usually interact with the world but it does make sense with the statistically-driven rules of quantum mechanics, and certain situation can be manipulated to reveal that weirdness.*
Of course, delayed choice doesn't have to be interpreted to mean that the future affects something that happened in the past. It could for instance mean that something you do in the present is only clarifying the past, or, as some of the people who first came up with the idea for delayed choice said, "the past has no existence except as is recorded in the present,"--which removes the time-travel-esque aspect. You could interpret it just as an example of probability threading it's way into real life--which is indeed how many people choose to interpret all of quantum's weirdness. Sometimes a roomful of physicists will not all agree on how to interpret how the heck subtle quantum mechanics things actually happens in reality, and physics is a field that is running into a wall on that whole "absolute objective reality" idea anyway--despite the fact that the math and general theories behind quantum mechanics are basically a settled science and research into how to use QM to make a better computer and help your GPS find itself, not to mention transmit information in space-age ways, are well underway.
So if a psychologist finds statistical significance to the idea that something we do in the present seems to inform something we've already done in the past--or however you want to interpret it--and if he has a carefully controlled and eventually repeated experiment, then hey, I'll call that an interesting stop in the scientific process.
*I have to put a disclaimer here that since photons are the only known and theoretically allowed things to move at the speed of light, interpreting as an actual example of delayed choice the experiment I did with just photons runs into some problems with special relativity. Ah well, the big problem in physics these days is that relativity and quantum mechanics don't mix. The entire setup, minus the lab components, is equally valid for electrons except that it costs a great deal more than the lab practical budget for an undergraduate physics department, in which case you have to admit you're in spooky-land because electrons, as clear particles, are then nonetheless doing some suspect wave-like things. And then it turns out that they've even passed fullerine molecules through double slits.
(That was a joke, you can stop throwing tomatoes now.)
Actually, I say why not, if other psychologists find it up to snuff, I see no reason why it's not an interesting and plausible study that is worth more research. To wit:
"One of the most respected, senior and widely published professors of psychology, Daryl Bem of Cornell, has just published an article that suggests that people — ordinary people — can be altered by experiences they haven't had yet. Time, he suggests, is leaking. The Future has slipped, unannounced, into the Present. And he thinks he can prove it."
Without claiming that this explains it, I will say that the framework of quantum mechanics would permit something like this to be within the realm of the possible, and our understanding of quantum mechanics is getting so good that I would not be terribly surprised if we did begin to see quantum effects appearing in realms of science even very removed from pure physics. That being said, actually linking the effects credibly would be beyond the scope of either branch of science individually and pretty damn difficult all around.
When I was an undergrad I performed a lab experiment called the "quantum eraser," in which I took the extraordinarily simple case of a beam of light emitted by a laser (thus, all the little light particles were suitably similar to each other as is unique to how lasers, masers, and the like emit light), and made the photons act a certain way based on what I did after the experiment was over.
It was called the "quantum eraser" because of what the laser light looked like on the wall, after I shone the laser beam through a screen with two slits. Usually, the light pattern looks something like this, which is notably different from the single dot of light your cat likes to chase across the floor. This laser dot looks like a prison window grill instead because when it passed through two slits, it interfered with itself. Bring up the usual analogy to dropping two rocks in a pond and watching how the ripple patterns change when they intersect each other: some places get extra big ripples, in some places the ripple goes away, and that's the beauty of things that are waves. Light is a wave, and it's also a particle--welcome to your very first step on the journey down the rabbit hole of quantum mechanics.
When I added in polarizers after each slit, so that light passing through one of the two slits could be distinguished from the light passing through the other one, I stopped seeing the prison-grill pattern and started seeing a normal dot of light again--I erased the pattern. But why should simply distinguishing the light from each beam do that? There is no reason that it should, except that quantum mechanics illogically says that in a situation such as each little light photon was supposed to have faced, whereby it arrives at Door #1 and Door #2 and has to pick one, but I, the observer, have no way of telling which one it actually picked, then it doesn't pick. It just behaves as if it went through both. Since it behaves that way, it can interfere with itself and make a light pattern that shows interference.
When I changed the experiment so that I could tell which slit the photons went through, then I observed what would happen if half had gone through one and half had gone through the other: just a dot, no interference. Furthermore the polarizers were located behind the slits: the light had already passed through by the time it reached them, yet being there, giving me the ability to tell what had happened, was enough. Even weirder, when I added in another polarizer downstream that erased the information the first polarizers had gathered--I'd see the stripes again, instead of the dot. All done after the light had gone and passed through the slits.
This is called delayed choice. One interpretation is that I can choose the outcome of the experiment based on what I want to observe, and it doesn't matter that I make that choice after the event I am observing actually happens. It doesn't necessarily make sense with how we usually interact with the world but it does make sense with the statistically-driven rules of quantum mechanics, and certain situation can be manipulated to reveal that weirdness.*
Of course, delayed choice doesn't have to be interpreted to mean that the future affects something that happened in the past. It could for instance mean that something you do in the present is only clarifying the past, or, as some of the people who first came up with the idea for delayed choice said, "the past has no existence except as is recorded in the present,"--which removes the time-travel-esque aspect. You could interpret it just as an example of probability threading it's way into real life--which is indeed how many people choose to interpret all of quantum's weirdness. Sometimes a roomful of physicists will not all agree on how to interpret how the heck subtle quantum mechanics things actually happens in reality, and physics is a field that is running into a wall on that whole "absolute objective reality" idea anyway--despite the fact that the math and general theories behind quantum mechanics are basically a settled science and research into how to use QM to make a better computer and help your GPS find itself, not to mention transmit information in space-age ways, are well underway.
So if a psychologist finds statistical significance to the idea that something we do in the present seems to inform something we've already done in the past--or however you want to interpret it--and if he has a carefully controlled and eventually repeated experiment, then hey, I'll call that an interesting stop in the scientific process.
*I have to put a disclaimer here that since photons are the only known and theoretically allowed things to move at the speed of light, interpreting as an actual example of delayed choice the experiment I did with just photons runs into some problems with special relativity. Ah well, the big problem in physics these days is that relativity and quantum mechanics don't mix. The entire setup, minus the lab components, is equally valid for electrons except that it costs a great deal more than the lab practical budget for an undergraduate physics department, in which case you have to admit you're in spooky-land because electrons, as clear particles, are then nonetheless doing some suspect wave-like things. And then it turns out that they've even passed fullerine molecules through double slits.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
The Experience Machine of the Future
Hey. I've been shoveling snow and consorting with family and trying to help keep a company in business and perfecting graduate school materials. So.
When Games Invade Real Life is my link for you today, envisioning a future in which everything we do works with the same incentive structure as a video game. Points for doing things you should do, like taking care of yourself and going to work, etc, points for doing things the advertising companies want you to do, like watching advertisements and buying their products. A whole world of points, and obviously, a whole world of some crazy computer system knowing everything you are doing all the time, down to the toothbrush in the morning that the toothpaste companies give you points for using. The speaker of this talk says it much better than I could.
Gaping privacy concerns that we in the Internet age just might have to learn to let go of aside, I'm not a huge video gamer, so this world in no way appeals to me for that reason alone. I like video games, but they bore me pretty quickly and I'd rather Go Live my Life. (I do quite like physical world role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, but I'm still going to reach a saturation point after a while.) But what if the game was my life? Or rather, my life really did work like a game? There is some powerful research out there into the power of intermittent reward, and don't some economists and social scientists and the like assert that most everything we do is based on reward and punishment, even if the reward is an intangible thing like "happiness" or "doing good things" as opposed to racking up money or points? This talk caught my attention because, dude, this guy, (Jesse Schell, big shot game designer), presents a downright plausible view of the future world. What if we really could re-structure our society that way, hi-jack our psychology into make us better people?
Yet I am reminded of an essay from ethics class, The Experience Machine. Despite the fact that a machine capable of allowing every person to plug in and experience his or her idea of ultimate happiness without realizing that it's all an illusion would, all practical problems like maintaining it and dying of starvation, etc. aside, make everybody as happy as possible, something inside of us still insists that plugging into such a machine would be a very wrong thing to do. Immoral, in some way we can't quite pin down. Missing out on something very important about being alive, despite the fact that all of us who were plugged in should have better lives, because we would have only those experiences we want to have.
Even if a game-like reward society could encourage us to do more things that are good for us individually and good for society as a whole, there's something still...if not wrong about it, then certainly something that is lost. Perhaps the problem is that we could make society "better," but better by whose definition? An "open-source" definition, edited by every entity that contributes to the game structure? That seems most likely, and it is the most benevolent possibility--although it is not the only possibility, and that is where those heck-of privacy issues start rearing their heads again.
Yet I protest along the same lines as Nozick supposes we would protest an experience machine: what if my definition of "better" falls utterly outside the confines of simple act and reward? What if I want to do things for reasons unrelated to racking up points, whatever real-world form the concept of "points" might take? Am I already lying to myself by believing that I do?
When Games Invade Real Life is my link for you today, envisioning a future in which everything we do works with the same incentive structure as a video game. Points for doing things you should do, like taking care of yourself and going to work, etc, points for doing things the advertising companies want you to do, like watching advertisements and buying their products. A whole world of points, and obviously, a whole world of some crazy computer system knowing everything you are doing all the time, down to the toothbrush in the morning that the toothpaste companies give you points for using. The speaker of this talk says it much better than I could.
Gaping privacy concerns that we in the Internet age just might have to learn to let go of aside, I'm not a huge video gamer, so this world in no way appeals to me for that reason alone. I like video games, but they bore me pretty quickly and I'd rather Go Live my Life. (I do quite like physical world role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, but I'm still going to reach a saturation point after a while.) But what if the game was my life? Or rather, my life really did work like a game? There is some powerful research out there into the power of intermittent reward, and don't some economists and social scientists and the like assert that most everything we do is based on reward and punishment, even if the reward is an intangible thing like "happiness" or "doing good things" as opposed to racking up money or points? This talk caught my attention because, dude, this guy, (Jesse Schell, big shot game designer), presents a downright plausible view of the future world. What if we really could re-structure our society that way, hi-jack our psychology into make us better people?
Yet I am reminded of an essay from ethics class, The Experience Machine. Despite the fact that a machine capable of allowing every person to plug in and experience his or her idea of ultimate happiness without realizing that it's all an illusion would, all practical problems like maintaining it and dying of starvation, etc. aside, make everybody as happy as possible, something inside of us still insists that plugging into such a machine would be a very wrong thing to do. Immoral, in some way we can't quite pin down. Missing out on something very important about being alive, despite the fact that all of us who were plugged in should have better lives, because we would have only those experiences we want to have.
Even if a game-like reward society could encourage us to do more things that are good for us individually and good for society as a whole, there's something still...if not wrong about it, then certainly something that is lost. Perhaps the problem is that we could make society "better," but better by whose definition? An "open-source" definition, edited by every entity that contributes to the game structure? That seems most likely, and it is the most benevolent possibility--although it is not the only possibility, and that is where those heck-of privacy issues start rearing their heads again.
Yet I protest along the same lines as Nozick supposes we would protest an experience machine: what if my definition of "better" falls utterly outside the confines of simple act and reward? What if I want to do things for reasons unrelated to racking up points, whatever real-world form the concept of "points" might take? Am I already lying to myself by believing that I do?
Friday, July 23, 2010
Nature Affects Nurture Politics
As he is so good at doing with his thoughtful posts and wide-range of links, Richard from Alleged Wisdom has timesucked me into pouring over social science articles in order to try to make sense of them. Instead of, you know, doing the "quantum astrophysics" I would otherwise be required to do by my contract of employment as a physical science dataslave research assistant. Darn that liberal arts college for making me take things like economics and history, instead of letting me just bury myself in pages and pages of integrals as if I I wouldn't actually hate not to ponder everything else and take an extra semester to graduate.
Note: I have kept this as a draft for a long time, trying to make it intelligent and coherent and Not Wrong as much as possible. I probably failed at all three points to some degree, but it was sure worth the try.
The idea: Studies show that political inclinations have a hereditary component. Hereditary, like, someone determined by the biology you inherent, not just preferring the opinions of your parents 'cause that's how mama raised you. I must stress that this is the "gut feeling", "it's just SO!" aspect of political inclination, not any sort of broad statement about your entire thought processes being ruled what genes you inheret, nor is it any kind of statement about the superiority or inferiority of one side or the other. Actually, it belies many attempts to argue the superiorioty of one side or the other by noting that positions may well be influenced by an essentially random component.
This idea has rocked my world over the past few days because I am inclined (genetically or otherwise) to be skeptical of a) proposed genetic explanations for something as complex as emergent human behavior, b) the potential distortion to which any "genetic" links to human behavior can be put by clumsy science reporters and/or scientists with an agenda. ( You think scientists don't sometimes have an agenda? Do you then think they ain't as human as the rest of us?)
Richard's link was not to the study but to a commentary at Overcoming Bias, which (as usual) has a decidedly philosophical take: unless you are convinced you have sufficient experience or evidence that makes you better informed than others who might take a position on a political issue, you should consider shifting your views toward the average because it might be that genes, thus, natural bias, rather than rationality, is guiding your inclination. Overcoming Bias is, as it sounds, a space for exercising rationality to recognize and surpass bias in search of objective truth, so recognizing "genetically"-induced biases is critically important--if that pursuit is what trips your trigger. Call me Carol Gilligan, but myself I'm not convinced of the uselessness nor the irradicability of subjective truth (this perhaps being a female trait), but that is a subject for another time and not the thesis of this post. I do applaud effort to find and remove bias from intellectual discourse, which, sadly, political discourse often is not.
Though always worthwhile at that blog, to save you the timesuck of reading the comments as well, I can sum them up in three main points: a) Some protest the numerical description of a political position and the ability to simply adjust it at will. How, they say, could you just shift your position on some issue from, say, 90 on a 1 to 100 scale to an 81, just because? How do you numerical-ize political positions anyway, and why is shifting just because useful? (The answer is to be more likely to have the true opinion, if genetic political bias is a source of misguidance toward less truth)
b) Some are confused or downright skeptical that political inclination could be hereditary at all, and how these scientists actually pinned down "percent caused by heredity" of a whole slue of issues. Me too, so more on this later.
Some commenters, reflecting the not-entirely-undeserved undertone of intellectual arrogance that nonetheless often irks me about Overcoming Bias, assert that they do not want to adjust their opinions to the average because the average is, by definition of average, influenced by the far-less-intelligent among us, and they don't want their intellectual opinions to be brought down by those of stupider people.
I admit to feeling that way myself sometimes.
Yet I have observed very intelligent people present on both the right and the left, (and, I hope, the left-center, where I claim to reside) and I have observed some appallingly stupid, or at least, not-too-prone-to-critical-thinking people on both sides. So clearly, there is more to do with it than IQ. I would naively posit that that extra factor is experience, so that an intelligent climate scientists is more likely to be in the correct opinion about global warming than an intelligent social scientist, but not as likely to be correct as that same social scientist is about the efficacy of government poverty prevention programs, for example. However, clever Mr. Hansen covers the experience question with his assertion that yes, if you have reason to suspect you have more experience with something than someone else, than your position is more likely to be correct, but still there is more to the story and that may well be your genetics. I would then posit with equal naiveté that the non-rational, gut-feeling part of politics, rather than genetics, comes from your moral foundations which in turn come from your upbringing and perhaps even your biology only so much as your moral foundations do. We know that nature influences you and nurture influences you, a more nuanced view being that nature influences how and to what degree you are influenced by nurture. It gets complicated so quickly--now he's got me all curious!
So I read the older study mentioned (not having Mr. Hansen's access to pay-service social science journals in order to get the new one), because I did want to know how exactly a quantification of the hereditary nature of each political question had come about. Being a physical scientist not a social scientist and not particularly schooled in statistical analysis to boot, I don't know if I've been able to grasp the true subtleties of the methodology, but I will do my best.
The study uses twins, both the "egg" kind in which a fertilized egg splits into two copies with identical genetic information*, and the "fraternal" kind in which two distinct eggs were hanging around to get fertilized instead of one. In the case of egg twins, genetic material is 100% the same, because the zygote copied itself. In the case of fraternal twins genetic material is just like normal siblings: 50% from the mother, 50% from the father but the what-from-each is randomized, still equaling 50% shared material overall. Whatever influence the uterine environment has on development, fraternal twins get to share that--but their different genetic material might mean they respond differently to it.
Yet fraternal twins make better comparison for genetic differences than siblings because their environment, while still very different due to ever-present subtle socialization, parental preference, experience differences starting from when you are physically able to occupy spaces other than the mother's womb, etc, is still more the same than it is for non like-aged siblings. Or, if you want to control for environment, then you can look at raised-apart fraternal or egg twins. To really say something you really ought to get a large sample size comprised of both.
The researchers looked at 30,000 twins and some of their close relatives in Virginia. They gave them a political survey designed to assess conservatism or lack thereof by providing words and phrases like "disarmament", "socialism", "patriotism" and asking for gut reactions either positive, negative, or don't know/neutral. They looked for correlation** in these surveys between egg twins, between fraternal twins, and also between a twin and another non-twin family member like a parent or sibling for comparison. If I'm reading it right, the idea is this: since egg twins have 100% identical genetic material, then an overall correlation of 1 between egg twin pairs would indicate a completely genetic-driven result. Since fraternal twins have only 50% shared genetic material, then an overall correlation of .5 between fraternal twin pairs would indicate something genetic-driven. Of course you don't get results that are 1 or .5, because politics is NOT purely a result of genetics. But you can differentiate genetic and environmental influences on twins giving similar answers using the following math:
To find the genetic component, subtract fraternal twin numbers from egg twin number and multiply by two. So if purely hereditary, a 1.0 for egg twins minus a 0.5 for fraternal will yeild 1.0-0.5=0.5*2 =1.0, or 100% genetic. To find the non-genetic, thus environmental, component, double the fraternal twin correlation then subtract the egg twin correlation, so that in a purely genetics-caused situation, 0.5 for fraternal twins *2 = 1.0-1.0=0. Thus you're scaling your result to reflect level of genetic or environmental influence on a scale of 0 to 1 for each, and you can, as they did, report results on genetic scale and on environment scale for a variety of political issues.
Since I'm reminded of the cliche "correlation does not equal causation"** and don't have a solid grip on the operative definition of either of those words as social scientists use them, I do worry that I'm missing something, because it seems to me that they are missing something. How can we be gauranteed that a correlation of 1 between egg twins and 0.5 between fraternal twins is necessarily a result of shared genetics? It does match the percentage of shared genetic material...but is it that simple?
Regardless, because of the survey itself, it is imposable to take culture completely out of it. Ideas such as "Republicans" (remember, respondents responded positively, negatively, or neutrally in each case), "Women's Liberation", "Modern Art" are very much culturally defined. The way to interpret these results thus is not "my genetics make me prone to having such and such gut feeling related to such and such political opinion." Rather, genetic variability is the underlying wildcard paired with cultural variability, perhaps determining how or to what extent we react to the cultural variable we are dealt. It is then more accurate to say that "my genetics make me more prone to reacting in such and such way in response to such and such cultural stimulus which translates into such and such gut feeling." The end result is the same: we sometimes have strong opinions based on non-rational components of our psyche. The fact that genetics can be pinpointed is both interesting and yet does not add anything particularly new to one's quest to overcome innate biases. The study is not providing a roadmap which takes one from particular alleles to particular tendencies for responding to particular environmental factors in particular ways that lead to particular political gut feelings, thus "genetics" may not even be a good word to use. Such a study may not be possible, and this one established fraction influenced by heritability of specific political inclinations. The hereditary fraction was never 1, the average heritability of all issues was 0.32 in the old study. Toward the quest to Overcome Bias: consciously avoiding decisions based on gut feelings as opposed to reasoning and experience should be an obvious course of action, no matter the source of the gut feelings. Is that harder to do if "genetics" is your enemy, as opposed to straight acculturation?
We physcists love to doubt and disdain the difficulty of social sciences, it's true. But we physicsts like to take situation and simplify them into models and Do Math on those models--and how can you create any simplified model of the human brain?
*I'm talking the part of our genome that makes us humans and individually expressed humans at that. Yes, we share 99% of our total genome with pretty much everything else on this planet.
*The authors note that "correlation" is technically "polychoric correlation analysis", which is standardly used on self-repsonse surveys where things are rated on a scale. I do not know any more about it than that, and since I'm supposed to be doing a very physical-science-y "cross-correlation" of spectra, I haven't got the time teach myself another barrage of statistical methods. Sorry.
Note: I have kept this as a draft for a long time, trying to make it intelligent and coherent and Not Wrong as much as possible. I probably failed at all three points to some degree, but it was sure worth the try.
The idea: Studies show that political inclinations have a hereditary component. Hereditary, like, someone determined by the biology you inherent, not just preferring the opinions of your parents 'cause that's how mama raised you. I must stress that this is the "gut feeling", "it's just SO!" aspect of political inclination, not any sort of broad statement about your entire thought processes being ruled what genes you inheret, nor is it any kind of statement about the superiority or inferiority of one side or the other. Actually, it belies many attempts to argue the superiorioty of one side or the other by noting that positions may well be influenced by an essentially random component.
This idea has rocked my world over the past few days because I am inclined (genetically or otherwise) to be skeptical of a) proposed genetic explanations for something as complex as emergent human behavior, b) the potential distortion to which any "genetic" links to human behavior can be put by clumsy science reporters and/or scientists with an agenda. ( You think scientists don't sometimes have an agenda? Do you then think they ain't as human as the rest of us?)
Richard's link was not to the study but to a commentary at Overcoming Bias, which (as usual) has a decidedly philosophical take: unless you are convinced you have sufficient experience or evidence that makes you better informed than others who might take a position on a political issue, you should consider shifting your views toward the average because it might be that genes, thus, natural bias, rather than rationality, is guiding your inclination. Overcoming Bias is, as it sounds, a space for exercising rationality to recognize and surpass bias in search of objective truth, so recognizing "genetically"-induced biases is critically important--if that pursuit is what trips your trigger. Call me Carol Gilligan, but myself I'm not convinced of the uselessness nor the irradicability of subjective truth (this perhaps being a female trait), but that is a subject for another time and not the thesis of this post. I do applaud effort to find and remove bias from intellectual discourse, which, sadly, political discourse often is not.
Though always worthwhile at that blog, to save you the timesuck of reading the comments as well, I can sum them up in three main points: a) Some protest the numerical description of a political position and the ability to simply adjust it at will. How, they say, could you just shift your position on some issue from, say, 90 on a 1 to 100 scale to an 81, just because? How do you numerical-ize political positions anyway, and why is shifting just because useful? (The answer is to be more likely to have the true opinion, if genetic political bias is a source of misguidance toward less truth)
b) Some are confused or downright skeptical that political inclination could be hereditary at all, and how these scientists actually pinned down "percent caused by heredity" of a whole slue of issues. Me too, so more on this later.
Some commenters, reflecting the not-entirely-undeserved undertone of intellectual arrogance that nonetheless often irks me about Overcoming Bias, assert that they do not want to adjust their opinions to the average because the average is, by definition of average, influenced by the far-less-intelligent among us, and they don't want their intellectual opinions to be brought down by those of stupider people.
I admit to feeling that way myself sometimes.
Yet I have observed very intelligent people present on both the right and the left, (and, I hope, the left-center, where I claim to reside) and I have observed some appallingly stupid, or at least, not-too-prone-to-critical-thinking people on both sides. So clearly, there is more to do with it than IQ. I would naively posit that that extra factor is experience, so that an intelligent climate scientists is more likely to be in the correct opinion about global warming than an intelligent social scientist, but not as likely to be correct as that same social scientist is about the efficacy of government poverty prevention programs, for example. However, clever Mr. Hansen covers the experience question with his assertion that yes, if you have reason to suspect you have more experience with something than someone else, than your position is more likely to be correct, but still there is more to the story and that may well be your genetics. I would then posit with equal naiveté that the non-rational, gut-feeling part of politics, rather than genetics, comes from your moral foundations which in turn come from your upbringing and perhaps even your biology only so much as your moral foundations do. We know that nature influences you and nurture influences you, a more nuanced view being that nature influences how and to what degree you are influenced by nurture. It gets complicated so quickly--now he's got me all curious!
So I read the older study mentioned (not having Mr. Hansen's access to pay-service social science journals in order to get the new one), because I did want to know how exactly a quantification of the hereditary nature of each political question had come about. Being a physical scientist not a social scientist and not particularly schooled in statistical analysis to boot, I don't know if I've been able to grasp the true subtleties of the methodology, but I will do my best.
The study uses twins, both the "egg" kind in which a fertilized egg splits into two copies with identical genetic information*, and the "fraternal" kind in which two distinct eggs were hanging around to get fertilized instead of one. In the case of egg twins, genetic material is 100% the same, because the zygote copied itself. In the case of fraternal twins genetic material is just like normal siblings: 50% from the mother, 50% from the father but the what-from-each is randomized, still equaling 50% shared material overall. Whatever influence the uterine environment has on development, fraternal twins get to share that--but their different genetic material might mean they respond differently to it.
Yet fraternal twins make better comparison for genetic differences than siblings because their environment, while still very different due to ever-present subtle socialization, parental preference, experience differences starting from when you are physically able to occupy spaces other than the mother's womb, etc, is still more the same than it is for non like-aged siblings. Or, if you want to control for environment, then you can look at raised-apart fraternal or egg twins. To really say something you really ought to get a large sample size comprised of both.
The researchers looked at 30,000 twins and some of their close relatives in Virginia. They gave them a political survey designed to assess conservatism or lack thereof by providing words and phrases like "disarmament", "socialism", "patriotism" and asking for gut reactions either positive, negative, or don't know/neutral. They looked for correlation** in these surveys between egg twins, between fraternal twins, and also between a twin and another non-twin family member like a parent or sibling for comparison. If I'm reading it right, the idea is this: since egg twins have 100% identical genetic material, then an overall correlation of 1 between egg twin pairs would indicate a completely genetic-driven result. Since fraternal twins have only 50% shared genetic material, then an overall correlation of .5 between fraternal twin pairs would indicate something genetic-driven. Of course you don't get results that are 1 or .5, because politics is NOT purely a result of genetics. But you can differentiate genetic and environmental influences on twins giving similar answers using the following math:
To find the genetic component, subtract fraternal twin numbers from egg twin number and multiply by two. So if purely hereditary, a 1.0 for egg twins minus a 0.5 for fraternal will yeild 1.0-0.5=0.5*2 =1.0, or 100% genetic. To find the non-genetic, thus environmental, component, double the fraternal twin correlation then subtract the egg twin correlation, so that in a purely genetics-caused situation, 0.5 for fraternal twins *2 = 1.0-1.0=0. Thus you're scaling your result to reflect level of genetic or environmental influence on a scale of 0 to 1 for each, and you can, as they did, report results on genetic scale and on environment scale for a variety of political issues.
Since I'm reminded of the cliche "correlation does not equal causation"** and don't have a solid grip on the operative definition of either of those words as social scientists use them, I do worry that I'm missing something, because it seems to me that they are missing something. How can we be gauranteed that a correlation of 1 between egg twins and 0.5 between fraternal twins is necessarily a result of shared genetics? It does match the percentage of shared genetic material...but is it that simple?
Regardless, because of the survey itself, it is imposable to take culture completely out of it. Ideas such as "Republicans" (remember, respondents responded positively, negatively, or neutrally in each case), "Women's Liberation", "Modern Art" are very much culturally defined. The way to interpret these results thus is not "my genetics make me prone to having such and such gut feeling related to such and such political opinion." Rather, genetic variability is the underlying wildcard paired with cultural variability, perhaps determining how or to what extent we react to the cultural variable we are dealt. It is then more accurate to say that "my genetics make me more prone to reacting in such and such way in response to such and such cultural stimulus which translates into such and such gut feeling." The end result is the same: we sometimes have strong opinions based on non-rational components of our psyche. The fact that genetics can be pinpointed is both interesting and yet does not add anything particularly new to one's quest to overcome innate biases. The study is not providing a roadmap which takes one from particular alleles to particular tendencies for responding to particular environmental factors in particular ways that lead to particular political gut feelings, thus "genetics" may not even be a good word to use. Such a study may not be possible, and this one established fraction influenced by heritability of specific political inclinations. The hereditary fraction was never 1, the average heritability of all issues was 0.32 in the old study. Toward the quest to Overcome Bias: consciously avoiding decisions based on gut feelings as opposed to reasoning and experience should be an obvious course of action, no matter the source of the gut feelings. Is that harder to do if "genetics" is your enemy, as opposed to straight acculturation?
We physcists love to doubt and disdain the difficulty of social sciences, it's true. But we physicsts like to take situation and simplify them into models and Do Math on those models--and how can you create any simplified model of the human brain?
*I'm talking the part of our genome that makes us humans and individually expressed humans at that. Yes, we share 99% of our total genome with pretty much everything else on this planet.
*The authors note that "correlation" is technically "polychoric correlation analysis", which is standardly used on self-repsonse surveys where things are rated on a scale. I do not know any more about it than that, and since I'm supposed to be doing a very physical-science-y "cross-correlation" of spectra, I haven't got the time teach myself another barrage of statistical methods. Sorry.
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