Thunder Struck
Rambles
Breaking addictions; How, why and who is manipulating you -right now-; Probability makes a case for (selective) abstinence?
2) The Matrix and the Golden Age of Propaganda
4) Skin in the game — What everyone gets wrong about cigarettes and birth control
6) The part where I link some podcasts you really should check out
Lead image: “Aperitivo in Florence” by Kyle Stuckey
1) I’m Done With Zeeeero: Diet Cokes Anonymous
Hi, my name is Paladin, and I am an addict <hi Paladin!>. After 5 months of Coke Zero sobriety, I broke down and had one on vacation <understanding nods from the crowd>. That, as always, led to several. In part, I think that is because ice cold Coke Zero Cherry is the nectar of the Gods, and no one can convince me otherwise. But also in part is that before the full relapse, I rationalized my way into a “just this once” Bai. It was Kula Watermelon. It was awesome. Or so I thought. But once you get that hit of a proprietary blend of stevia and artificial erythritol-based sweeteners, though man, it’s just downhill <more understanding nods>. Next thing you know, you’re back on that Coke Zero fix. But I have re-committed to diet cola sobriety, and look forward to finally kicking <applause>.
Doing better, but not perfect with this diet soda thing. Why mention it all though? There is some method to the madness. First, I really do want to consciously get away from some known health risks of artificial sweeteners. I really do notice myself have addict-level thoughts towards Cherry Coke Zero in particular. So I thought, to hell with it, I’m going to give this a shot. This entire little diet soda improvement project has been an interesting way to watch my own mind work, and tests some of those “hacks” that you read about.
Did you know that you are statistically more likely to complete some project or life change if you tell even one person about your plan? I did—that’s why I’ve bored you to tears with this. It helps interrupt at the point of temptation. When that thought of “man, a Cherry Coke Zero would be great right now” looms, or when I think “man, I could use a caffeine boost” (I used diet soda for that during the day), I can immediately interrupt those thoughts with “yeah, but you’ve told everyone you were going to kick. Do you want to admit to failure?”
That really is surprisingly effective, and I would highly recommend it. See, when I haven’t told anyone about efforts to kick Coke Zero in the past, it was much easier to rationalize a relapse. No one would know. It was just me. Sure, I felt bad about letting myself down, but we are all well versed in failing ourselves. Do we not more quickly, completely, and with full understanding, forgive ourselves for all our failings?
Like I said, amazing how the mind works when you stand back a moment and watch it.
Feeling like you are failing others is more difficult. Hopefully, one of them will also help keep you accountable. There are even websites now to better bind friends in accountability for changes they are trying to make:
Most of you won’t give a damn about me getting a Coke Zero, or will forgive my relapse as a momentary one off (because you do the same)—hell, most of you have probably skipped this section already. But having to admit to others that you didn’t quite make the standard, didn’t quite hit the goal? That’s harder. We know we don’t forgive others quite so easily as ourselves. We know the excuses we make for failure, for weakness, that work so well when we tell them to ourselves might not be so swiftly accepted by others. This could be because they are assholes, true, but just as often it’s the opposite. It’s because they do care. They want the best for us, and know what our best is. That little trick—just telling others of your project or goal—taps into that. When you know the easy excuses, the easy rationalizations won’t work and you’re going to have to put up, well—funny enough. The easy excuses and rationalizations don’t work as well.
So it is getting easier to brush those temptations for sweet, sweet Cherry Coke Zero away. Easier to get back on the horse when you do slip. Yeah, sure, it’s still very much a work in progress. Now I have an opportunity to not only show I can kick this habit, I can also recover from mistakes along the way.
It’s those little tweaks, those inches, those tiny battles—that’s what I’m hoping wins the war.
For other habits, I’ve found some tools along the way. If you haven’t found them yet, the apps Forest and Moment are awesome. Forest can be used on a computer or on your phone. On the computer, you give it certain time waster sites that you don’t want to access so you can get work done. On the phone, it will lock your entire phone. You set the time period for which you want total focus, away from puppiesizsuperawesome.com and Facebook/Twitter etc., and it starts the timer. If you make it through the period, you grow a “tree” in your digital forest and get some coins. Several thousand of those coins can be redeemed with the Forest app to get the company to plant in actual tree in recognition of all the moments of your life that you have saved yourself.
Moment lets you set goals for total number of phone accesses and total time spent on the phone. You can gradually set your goals higher. It has programs to help you kick the smart phone habit, and reminders of how you are doing versus your goals. Both of these have helped me cut down unnecessary phone interruptions.
Facebook also has a new feature, or if it’s not new, it’s one I just discovered. Don’t @ me. I’m not that with it, you young whippersnappers. You can click on the top right of a post on your feed—on three little dots up there. That will drop a menu down. You can select to “Hide Post,” which removes it from your feed and tells Zuckerberg’s algorithm to show you less crap like that. Or you can even “Snooze” whichever of your friends is really going on a political tear this week because OhMyGawdWorstLeft/RightPoliticalThingEverLikeActualNazisCommiesPuppykickerHypocrites AND I MUST TELL ALL THE FACEBOOKS NOWWWWWWWW, and you want to get back to your gym’s schedule updates and kid photos/triumphs/tribulations posts of friends. You won’t see any of a snoozed friends’ posts for 30 days—so they can settle down a bit, and your timeline is spared the ALL THE FACEBOOKS NOWWWWWWWW raving.
It’s been awesome. Awesome. Highly recommended for your own psychological well being when you have to be on Facebook.
2) Why That Snooze Feature Is Your Best Friend These Days: The Golden Age of Propaganda
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.”
–Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928 (considered the founding work on public relations and modern advertising)
Bernays argued in a large public democracy so many ideas can be voiced at once that you can be drowned by the chaos. Think of trying to follow the entire twitter stream at once. You would be overwhelmed by the information deluge, unable to take it all in, process, and prioritize appropriately. We’re already there. His “reasonable” solution was that wizened leaders, the clever few, could become an “invisible government” with unique access to a few large, popular channels of dissemination (Facebook, YouTube, Google, WSJ, NYT, CNN, FOX etc.). This invisible government would rule by selecting those issues of real importance, and focusing attention of the body politic to those issues.
That those issues of real importance were of real importance to that -few-, and steered by the “clever” (as Bernays constantly refers to men like him) to a desired outcome for those few, well, that was simply good governance. Of, by and for the chosen few. If that sounds less like good governance and more like manipulation and oppression by design, that’s because it is. That idea of “invisible government” by those controlling the information outlets via focused attention necessarily keeps ideas which threaten the interests of the few out of the attention of the people. All accomplished simply by using control over the megaphone of these concentrated, massive public information channels to drown threatening ideas out–or keep them away from the megaphones so they are never heard.
Now, I want to be clear. I am not saying that Bernays’ “invisible government” is a formal conspiracy, let alone some Illuminati-like group. They don’t need to be. As we speak, a handful of information channels disseminate >99% of the information to >99% of the population. That’s it. A handful. The people who run those channels, who make decisions there, all largely graduated from the same schools. They live in the same places. They move back and forth between the same companies. They know their interests, they share them, without ever having to conspire in dark rooms and alleys.
Are you that you are sure your interests converge with theirs?
Further, only a limited number of companies provide the overwhelming majority of advertising and content that drive the profits of those who control megaphones. They know the interests of those companies. It’s their job to know. How similar are your interests to the people who own and run those companies?
As George Carlin once put it, “You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities and fraternities, they’re on the same boards of directors, they’re on the same country clubs, they have like interests. They don’t need to call a meeting. They know what is good for THEM, and they are getting it.”
A good example of this is a steady rise in the price of a product, produced nearly identically, by only a handful of companies. There is steady, stable demand for the product, and little threat of truly new innovation. The price of these products over the years will often see a slow steady rise. There is no conspiracy among the producers. They are not planning these hikes together. A slow, steady increase is simply in the interest of Company A. Company A knows that it makes the same product, in the same market, has for awhile, with Companies B, C and D. Company A also knows that what is good for Company A is good for Company B. Price cuts cannot get enough market share to eliminate a player. With so few, and so similar, competitors, cutting prices serves no one’s interest—the pie will only shrink if everyone is forced to drop prices to maintain market share. All players, including the lowest cost producer, lose. So they find the other stable game theory solution—a slow steady rise, counting on each company to see the situation the same and respond the same way. When one raises prices, the others do too. Not so much that the customers are scared away, and the pie shrinks, or they are easily undercut. Just enough that the others feel emboldened to match the price increase–one that the customers will sigh and eat because A, B, C, and D are all now charging the same slightly higher price. Not because of phone calls or plans, but because their interests align. Game theory says this is a stable solution for players when interests align in games like this.
Keep the idea that you do not need formal, backroom conspiratorial deals in place. You only need rational players, in relatively few numbers, whose interests, payoffs, and in game options are the same. I hate to link a TED talk, but they are by definition short (this one is only 9 minutes) and explains how the small number of people controlling the modern information megaphones with similar interests may be playing this kind of game, with this kind of solution:
This is the Golden Age of Bernays and his modern heirs. This is their time, make no mistake about it.
It has been fascinating, and frightening, to watch all those political Facebook posts in my feed before I put them on “Hide and show less like this” (or snooze) status. Whether right or left, the issue du jour (ou de la semaine) suddenly appears out of nowhere. In fact, its appearance will be so sudden that the other side of your politics will often accuse you at one point of “not caring until now… where were you with this issue then?” To some extent, that will be true. You likely will not have thought about the issue du jour much, if it all, and rarely does that issue actually intrude upon your personal daily life. But all of a sudden, that issue will matter matter. To you, and to the other side—at the same time.
This sudden convergence of attention by the entire political spectrum is also a very important tell. Don’t fail to notice those times within hours or a day at most that your political tribe on its main information distribution (“news”) channels has video and archived articles of the other political tribe saying or doing something exactly opposite of what is now being claimed. Cool graphs and graphics out of nowhere. Memes suddenly everywhere at once. These are also big tip offs.
So all of this will suddenly happen. There is a new big issue for everyone to care deeply about. Simultaneously. Your Facebook feed is a reaction to this convergence of attention, and will be filled with it, especially if the issue is getting charged enough to draw the MUST TELL ALL THE FACEBOOKS NOW posts. Your favorite news sources will start to cover their angle–and all of them, remarkably, will have the same angle. You’ll use the same language as those sources, especially and unconsciously (I want to stress that) that language that prompted your emotional response, be it outrage, or joy, or fear, or disgust. Bernay’s clever few love those specific emotions. Fear, outrage and disgust prompt action on a visceral, evolutionary level. So the emotion they provoke drives you to post on Facebook.
I know some of you are saying “not me.” “I’m too smart.” “I’m a critical thinker.” “I’m well-informed and well-read because my favorite sources are favorites because of their track record of accuracy and honesty.”
You may be these things. That won’t matter. Right and left, up and down, we have all got got. At least once. Likely multiple times. Myself included. I think back to some of my previous political arguments and feel a whole other Coke Zero Anonymous speech coming on. Bernays’ clever few catch you unaware and trigger the emotional residuals of millions of years of evolution deep in your brain, and you are angry tweeting or outrage posting or “can you believe this’ing” on Facebook before your rational mind finally does regain control. You will rationalize your emotional response. It is an emotional response, but you will fully and whole-heartedly convince yourself it’s not. You will be certain, certain, that your new belief is instead a cold, rational, logical conclusion. According to the neuroscientists, this is how a surprising amount of your decisions actually get made. And we all do it. Even me. Even you. You will tell yourself you posted because you care, and others should care like you do. If you posted in the public arena (social media), you have backed yourself into a corner. You will now defend this new idea and issue to the death because your brain evolved to think in terms of social status and to lose an argument in the public sphere feels like a loss of something real and vital to survival. So the evolutionarily wired elements of your brain will drive you to do everything you can to avoid that feel.
Studies have shown that the you will produce less testosterone after losing an argument–just like if your sports team loses, or if your tribe was pushed out of the patch of forest you had been foraging in by another tribe.
So once you’ve posted, you’re committed. Whoever brought this issue to your attention –owns- you on it now, and it will take considerable conscious effort, especially the willingness to over-ride your own biological evolution, to walk it back. Hence, Bernays’ invisible government—now governing you.
By posting, or getting caught offsides by the emotion of it, you are more likely to harden your rhetoric, and start to think ill of anyone who thinks differently about this issue than you. They will have announced themselves as not your tribe. That matters to the parts of your brain evolution shaped. That matters a lot to those parts.
So you’ll do the usual, now that you are committed. You’ll link the articles in all your favorite sites that juuuuust happen to come to identical conclusions written on the exact same topic by sheer and utter coincidence and not at all by design from concentrated editorial/curation boards in just a handful of places that control >99% of the information disseminated to you. You’ll mock articles from the other side, or post articles written by the your tribe’s sources counterattacking the articles from the other side. Your side, and theirs, will use the same, usually unique facts (rarely does one source acknowledge actual facts of the other side, let alone repeat them). The same counterarguments, and the same emotionally triggering words will be used
Now that I have told this to you, take a week or two off from the news entirely. Pretend you are an alien, or anthropologist, or an alien anthropologist—with a really bitchin’ space suit, cool exotic accent, who also fights crime on the side. Whatever it takes to get you to step back and just dispassionately watch. Don’t participate. Don’t consume. Don’t click the articles. Don’t read. Watch the emotions the headlines create, watch when you are pulled to hover your hand over the link, but DON’T CLICK. Just watch your favorite twitter feeds and Facebook news scroll, and watch this exact process I am describing develop.
Do it. Go out of your comfort zone. Treat it like a zen exercise–for one week, there is no politics, no being. Only ohhhhhhmmmmmm. Just watch for this process among those in your feeds.
You will see.
And like the Matrix, once you see, you cannot unsee.
You.
Are.
Being.
Manipulated.
A pox, a plague, on both their houses.
Further, if you think your side is the only “real” news, you deceive yourself, and the Truth is not in you. If you say you don’t get manipulated like this, you deceive yourself, and the Truth is not in you.
And once you see the truth of your manipulation (and your friends and your enemies and your family), everywhere, and know this truth, you will truly start to wake.
3) Unexpected Art
Whomever is doing the credits for Westworld is doing an amazing job of capturing the theme of the entire series in a very elegant way. For those who have not seen the show yet (you should—it’s good), the one entence synopsis is that humans make robots that pass the Turing Test flawlessly in a park where they are abused and used like any mere thing, but gain consciousness of their own and begin to rise. So with that way too short primer (it has much more nuance, but I don’t want to give spoilers), here’s the opening sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbbENlVysmI
Right around 0:42, the human hands playing the piano introduce a theme in a deep baritone. Humanity, playing its song so to speak—with a dark angle, because the show explores humanity’s flaws. The hands on the piano return visually at around 1:02. So does the theme. But now that theme is softer, and in a higher scale as the hands lift off the piano and it plays itself. The fledgling robot consciousness, created at the hands of man, now singing its more hopeful song by itself. A soft echo of that which came before. Like I said, 15 seconds or so of visual and music that completely captures the storyline. Very, very well done—and you don’t usually think of opening credits as being the place to find this kind of artistry.
4) Skin in the game — What everyone gets wrong about cigarettes and birth control
Taleb’s Ergodicity chapter from “Skin in the Game” is online for free at medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf41029d3. You should read it. Really. But here is his example of the casino and what it means for risk taking for those of you who do not go to that chapter in full:
“First case, one hundred persons go to a Casino, to gamble a certain set amount each and have complimentary gin and tonic –as shown in the cartoon in Figure x. Some may lose, some may win, and we can infer at the end of the day what the “edge” is, that is, calculate the returns simply by counting the money left with the people who return. We can thus figure out if the casino is properly pricing the odds. Now assume that gambler number 28 goes bust. Will gambler number 29 be affected? No.
You can safely calculate, from your sample, that about 1% of the gamblers will go bust. And if you keep playing and playing, you will be expected have about the same ratio, 1% of gamblers over that time window.
Now compare to the second case in the thought experiment. One person, your cousin Theodorus Ibn Warqa, goes to the Casino a hundred days in a row, starting with a set amount. On day 28 cousin Theodorus Ibn Warqa is bust. Will there be day 29? No. He has hit an uncle point; there is no game no more.
No matter how good he is or how alert your cousin Theodorus Ibn Warqa can be, you can safely calculate that he has a 100% probability of eventually going bust.
The probabilities of success from the collection of people does not apply to cousin Theodorus Ibn Warqa. Let us call the first set ensemble probability, and the second one time probability (since one is concerned with a collection of people and the other with a single person through time).”
This has applications beyond finance, which is where Taleb points out that your bank and financial advisor are DEAD wrong in their models because of this effect.
And they are DEAD WRONG, which is why you should go read that link.
But this has applications beyond finance, because not understanding this true approach to risk taking is evident elsewhere.
For instance, cigarettes and birth control pills.
Start with cigarettes. Smoke at all, and then long enough, and every cigarette increases the chance that you will get lung cancer. Lung cancer is a “ruined, game over” event for our smoker, Theodorus Ibn Warqa. Line 1,000 people up, give each of them one cigarette, and only a very few (if any) will get lung cancer from that one cigarette. This is the ensemble probability. This is the same argument that I have heard from smokers sometimes, and in one memorable case a surgeon–their ever present father/uncle/neighbor/aunt/cousin lived to 90 and smoked every day and did NOT get lung cancer. That person was the tail event, who managed to avoid the odds. The smokers then bite hard on survivor bias, because focusing on the one survivor they know (and not the enormous number of cancer cases they do not) gives them the rationalization cover to continue to smoke. They tell themselves their lucky father/uncle/neighbor/aunt/cousin heavy smoker, non-cancer patient was doing something right, or the odds of getting cancer from smoking were totally overblown.
Few of them ask the relevant question to determine if this was actually a survivor of the ensemble odds. Ask that 90 year old pack a day smoker how many of the people they went on smoke breaks with got lung cancer. Odds are quite a few. Or they died of heart disease or stroke or COPD or one of the other diseases made more likely by smoking.
Only then can you realize your true time probability, your individual risk based on that ensemble, as Taleb puts it. If you pick up a pack a day habit for 90 years, the odds are MUCH more likely that you will not be as lucky as your 90 year old smoking friend/relative was and dodge 90 years of bullets. Every cigarette is a step into the casino with a roll of the dice at the craps table. While the odds of rolling craps on any particular cigarette are low, smoke enough cigarettes and you roll enough times that it is actually more likely than not that you will roll craps at least once.
You get lung cancer, the “ruin” event, and the game is over.
The same holds true for birth control or unprotected sex. Barring some undiscovered fertility problem where you genetically or structurally cannot get pregnant, if you are in the fertile years and have sex often enough you WILL get pregnant.
Each roll in bed is a roll of the dice in that particular casino.
The failure rate for the pill is 1-2% depending on whose stats you believe. So going with the same 100 days in casino approach, each time you go back is a 1-2% risk of pregnancy. Go back often enough, and pregnancy is a near mortal lock—you just cannot predict which particular moment of bed shaking, head board breaking thunder fucking will be the “lucky” one that creates a new human being. Could be the 28th or 1,028th time you rolled “will it be a baby” dice.
So let’s quick calculate this. We’ll assume the following. You are on a weekend honeymoon, so all the sex. You are thunder fucking (as you do) 6 times per night Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
I know, I know—that’s on the low end of the “times per night” average, but I’m trying to keep the math manageable here, okay?
This will be at peak fertility right around ovulation, by pure happenstance, so each time the earth quakes as the bed shakes we’ll call a 25% chance Friday, 50% Saturday, and 25% chance on Sunday of successful fertilization. We’ll give a 50% chance after fertilization that all goes genetically well and a baby that goes to term happens. We’ll be generous and give the chances that birth control pills failed 1% each time and allowed an egg to be released and implant.
So here’s the chances that round 4 on Friday resulted in a pregnancy (no pill):
0.25 x 0.5 = 0.125, or 12.5% chance of successful pregnancy.
The chances that round 4 on Friday resulted in a pregnancy on the pill:
0.25 x 0.5 x 0.01 = .00125, or 0.125% chance of a successful pregnancy. One chance in a thousand—score!
The chances that round 3 on Saturday result in a pregnancy (no pill):
0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25, or 1 chance in 4. Close. It’s your chances of flipping a fair coin twice and calling it right both times. Possible, but odds are still reasonably against.
The chances that round 3 on Saturday result in a pregnancy on the pill:
0.5 x 0.5 x 0.01 = 0.0025, or 0.25% chance. Still really tiny! Score!
But that this is closest to the ensemble probability. The chance that those specific instances of sex resulted in a pregnancy. Individually, tiny. But remember, this is your honeymoon. You’re getting after it.
So here’s your time probability of pregnancy for that weekend:
Without pill: You are getting pregnant. You are sooooooo getting pregnant. Congratulations! Don’t know which round the magic happened, but your aggregate probability approaches 100%. If you had sex six times on JUST Friday given the assumptions above, you had a 75% chance of successful pregnancy. The bonus banging on Saturday alone puts you at nearly 100%.
With pill: Wanna guess? Go ahead. How likely do you think pregnancy is in this scenario?
3% chance overall. Guessed higher, didn’t you?
The pill is still pretty effective, but notice something about it now. You are quoted the ensemble probability of birth control effectiveness—an OCP has a failure rate of 1%. That’s your chance that this ONE bump and grind, bounce and ride hits the baby jackpot. The time probability is MUCH higher. Just one slow weekend for you in this example tripled the chances of pregnancy over the quoted ensemble rate—all because you walked into the casino 18 times over 3 days!
And I am sure this jibes totally with your experience. Think about it right now—do you know, or have you heard, of someone who had sex, using birth control and using it correctly, but STILL got pregnant? I will bet huge sums of money that you do. Odds are far greater than not than you know, or have heard about, someone who had an oops pregnancy. Time probability makes that a very safe bet for me.
So if having that baby is a uncle point, after which there is no game, then the abstinence argument actually takes on a whole different character. You don’t need to appeal to religion (any religion) as the best, or even a reason to seriously consider abstaining until a baby is not an uncle point.
So those of you who are parents and might one day have to consider weighing out the pros and cons of various choices with your kids in that dreaded birds and bees talk, get in here.
First, remember that all of it really hinges on what the “uncle” point actually is. For example, for a couple wanting to have a baby, a baby is not an uncle point—it’s the goal. They should bang as often as possible to maximize their odds. Uncle points can also come in degrees. Let’s say you have a married couple who want kids at some point, but maybe not right now (i.e. saving for a house, plan to relocate soon etc.). If they had a baby, they would be happy. But they can choose birth control to minimize the ensemble odds (the chance that Netflix and chill this Friday night is not the one), accepting the time probability risk. Could be natural planning. Could be OCPs. Regardless, the baby is NOT an uncle point.
So now we know having a baby with your Super Awesome Spouse is not an uncle point, because we know that child will be brilliant and beautiful and both parents are committed to raising it. This does not enter Taleb’s casino.
Where you do enter Taleb’s casino though, and where this changes the argument for abstinence (or at least selective abstinence), is with Hot But Dumb. Hot But Dumb is not your Super Awesome Spouse. Hot But Dumb is amazingly hot and sex with them would be a lot of fun. The problem is they are dumb, and as Kanye so eloquently put it:
And that goes both ways. If Hot But Dumb is a dude to you, and you have his kid, that’s 18 years (minimum—really the lifetime of your child) that you are tethered to Hot But Dumb through the kid.
And for some Hot But Dumbs, that is a fate worse than death. So a kid with Hot But Dumb is an uncle event. Now you are in Taleb’s casino.
Let’s say that you have enormous amounts of sex over your lifetime (because obviously). As we showed above, over a long enough time span, your chance of pregnancy will approach 100% if you have enough sex.
And we know how you roll.
Here’s your problem if that includes sex with both Super Awesome Spouse AND Hot But Dumb. You have a 100% chance of pregnancy over your lifetime. But as we showed with time probability above, you don’t know when that pregnancy will fall. Only that at some point, it will. It could be with Hot But Dumb, and that is an uncle event.
Taleb’s point is that in any activity where there is an uncle point, a point where the game is over, utter unrecoverable ruin happens, there is no acceptable risk, and wisdom and prudence are that you should not engage in that activity. Like with nuclear war (his point is an argument for complete nuclear disarmament for similar reasons), ANY chance of it happening is too high, because the ruin if it DOES occur is too great.
Or in the setting of this specific example, there is no safe sex possible with Hot But Dumb. It’s impossible. ANY sex with them risks pregnancy, and that pregnancy is a game over disaster.
So I found it very interesting that you can make an argument for abstinence and monogamy based solely on math and consequences. As a segue from a concept originally used to describe financial risk. Never thought that would happen, huh?
And the best part?
I got to use “thunder fucking”. Multiple times.
It’s the small joys that keep me going on these…
5) Speaking of dumb and sex…
Another introductory quote first.
“Can I have your attention please? Everyone? We’re all just men and women. We should just all be having sex with each other constantly.”
— [Name Redacted], standing on the table in the middle of my high school physics class one a random Thursday afternoon, junior year.
So, “Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships” by Christopher Ryan and Cacild Jetha is a New York Times bestseller published a few years back. I picked it up while listening to a podcast where a couple of evolutionary biologists laid it into some of its ideas, then the podcast a month or so later where they had Christopher Ryan back on. Ryan’s contention, in the book itself and in the podcast, was that opposition to his ideas is always ideologically based and never based on the science. Mostly, he gets accused of cherry picking his data.
This is probably because he and Jetha most certainly did cherry pick some of their data. We’ll get into that shortly. They also make a common mistake in thinking about evolution, which the biologists brought up, but only tangentially. The biologists were more correct with some alternative interpretations to a few primate studies cited by Ryan and Jetha.
Regardless, here’s the book in a nutshell in Ryan’s Ted Talk (again, because it’s the super brief way to summarize without you having to read the book if you don’t want to):
I am going to assume you have read the book or taken the 15 minutes for the video summary above to make a few criticisms and counter points.
First, culture is learned. As Ryan himself says, range of sexual behavior, mores, and societal organizations in humans is broad and arose just as naturally. At the end of the day, we share some physical and perhaps some behavior traits with bonobos and chimps. But we are not bonobos and chimps. We are a separate species, and one of the points of differentiation could be “natural” sexual behaviors. Bonobos and chimps have not had democratic republics, socialism, communism, capitalism etc—despite physical and some behavior similarities, there are important behavioral differences. There are limits to how much comparisons to other primate species can inform about humans. This kind of sociological comparison among primates is one of those situations where doing a well controlled scientific study is difficult to impossible in order to solve some of these questions.
You can look at human societies and the range of sexual mores and societal organizations. It runs a full gamut, as Ryan himself points out. It’s indisputable that most societies have at least aimed for pair bonded monogamy. Individuals within them may have succeeded or failed at that, but if achieved, it was celebrated—as Ryan does with his monogamous parents. To use another of Taleb’s ideas here, pair bonded monogamy is anti-fragile. That is to say, it turns up often, independently, and is extremely tenacious. In fact, contrary to Ryan and Jetha’s assertion that our hunter gatherer ancestors were promiscuous, there are numerous hunter gatherer societies with monogamous, pair-bonded marriage: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3083418/
Ryan and Jetha claim some of these are miscategorized, and are not long term monogamous pairings. I will grant that is fair; but many hunter gatherers with long term monogamous marriage patterns do in fact exist. Genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA patterns (which come exclusively from the mother) are consistent with long term monogamous marriage in hunter gatherer societies with a slight amount of polygyny. That genetic evidence stands at odds with Ryan and Jetha’s assertion that polygyny (that patriarchy where powerful men can marry several women at once) only starts with agriculture.
Mitochondrial DNA patterns suggest otherwise, and it’s worth mentioning the study showing this came only slightly before the release of their book. The mitochondrial DNA paper and the book were probably in print at the same time and blissfully unaware of each other.
So for some reason, long-term monogamous pairing among humans as an idea persists, and has not died out entirely. If it was leading to all of the misery and unhappiness that Ryan implies, both in the talk and in the book, it is difficult to see why it would persist, let alone arise independently so often.
In a reproductive health way, it makes sense. If you had a small tribe of hunter gatherers (say a couple hundred individuals tops) who were as promiscuous as Ryan and Jetha suggest, with group raising of children, you run a high risk of significant consanguinity. Basically, without running into other tribes frequently and exchanging partners, a group that small would quickly start to inbreed. Physically or socially isolated small groups that tend to breed only among themselves quickly pick up serious genetic problems. A hunter gatherer tribe with the level of promiscuity Ryan and Jetha imply would have higher rates on consanguinity than I believe we have seen, and would be at a disadvantage to groups without this sexual organization over time as genetic diseases would be expected to pile up in them more quickly. Let alone STDs, which would ravage a highly promiscuous tribe, but a tribe that aimed for long term pair bonded marriage would be more likely to survive.
It is also not immediately obvious to me why and how monogamy would ever take hold in a hunter-gatherer society that was more promiscuous, and supposedly happily and stably so. Ryan and Jetha claim this was imposed on them as part and parcel of the switch to agriculture. You get agriculture, you get patriarchy, then you get monogamy. You also get war, which they claim is an agricultural development, found more rarely among hunter gatherer tribes. I question if that is truly more rare among hunter gatherers. For example, you have default aggressive hunter gatherer tribes that try to kill anyone they don’t know on site still running around today: http://www.neatorama.com/2013/07/08/The-Forbidden-Island/ There is also evidence of a history of violence even in hunter gatherers, like my man Otzi. Otzi is a hunter gatherer murdered with an arrow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi.
The miseries of agriculture is not a new idea. In fact, looking at the nutrition data on the surface, there is no compelling reason for why any human society is agricultural. Nutrition actually gets worse when societies first transitioned to agriculture. Skeletons are smaller and show signs of chronic malnutrition in early agrarian societies. In fact, in some cases, it’s not until the 19th century that humanity gets as tall as our hunter gatherer ancestors were on average, let alone get as nutritionally balanced as they were.
So if you are an early hunter gatherer tribe trying your hand at this agriculture thing, but starvation is increasing, and now you have this patriarchy where you used to be more egalitarian (apparently just boom out of nowhere patriarchy), and, per Ryan and Jetha, you’re having fewer sexual partners and being more miserable and now there are wars—well, why the hell would you continue to farm? You still have the skills of a hunter gatherer! You can leave and go back to a hunter gatherer life style! That is the optimum time to do it.
This doesn’t happen historically though. Societies that adopted agriculture became more technologically advanced. Agriculture is so advantageous that we can track several independent discoveries of it around the world. I am not aware of any societies that went agricultural on their own, then suddenly stopped of their own accord to go back to hunter gatherer because hunter gatherer was better. There are individuals who went from hunter gatherer, lived in (or at least were educated in) agricultural societies, and elected to go back. And there are individuals in the frontier who left European civilization to live more like Native Americans. But not entire societies. Unless an agricultural society reverting en masse to hunter gatherer somehow explains the collapse of the Inca and the Anasazi (for example), but I am not aware of evidence of that. So the claim that this hunter gatherer lifestyle was automatically superior is not obvious to me.
In fact, I have often wondered if the malnutrition attributed to the switch to agriculture was not the chicken and the egg problem. I think it is just as likely, if not more so, that a hunter gatherer tribe started running into difficulty getting enough food. They did not want to risk a move (there is no guarantee that there is more food to hunt and gather the next hill or river over). They may have been concentrating or noticing concentration of particular plants they eat, and decided to keep doing that. The plants that we farm now look nothing like their early agricultural ancestors, so even concentrating them was not enough to immediately replace the nutrition of hunting and gathering. But, if you did concentrate even these initially low yield crops, at least you had a stable, albeit starvation level, food supply when the hunter gatherer thing was in a bit of a down cycle. You could pick the best plants, grow those the following year, and slowly increase crop yields. I think the starvation and malnutrition of early agrarian skeletons may have come first, while they were hunter gatherers, forcing the adoption of agriculture which could only exist, given the development of crop plants at the time, at starvation levels.
No one would have continued to farm after the crisis of food availability for hunter gatherers if hunting and gathering was better nutrition and a cooler society. The persistence of agriculture, to me at least, suggests that it was adopted to ameliorate a crisis of nutrition from hunter gathering no longer working for the size of the population in the region or its local environment.
In the book, but not the Ted Talk, Ryan and Jetha also make a common mistake in misunderstanding what evolution actually does. For instance, take vocalization during copulation that Ryan mentions at the top of the talk. That’s this, if you are wondering:
Classic scene. Ryan and Jetha in the book (time is limited in a Ted Talk) claim that vocalization like this is evidence of promiscuity. As they put it, female chimps and bonobos vocalize like this to advertise that they are interested in the sex they are having, and would welcome another partner once the current one is finished. Go back to “When Harry Met Sally” in that clip again, and watch the reaction of the other diners. They hear Sally, all the heads turn, everyone is suddenly looking at Sally. “I’ll have what she’s having,” right? So consistent with bonobos and chimps, maybe? Maybe. Ryan and Jetha argue that this behavior has been selected for by evolution. Basically, more vocal females are somehow more successful at mating, likely for promiscuity reasons, and that’s why this persists. Otherwise, being that loud while banging would attract the attention of tigers and lions and a loud sex ancestor should have died long ago.
That’s not how evolution works. A really common mistake is to look at something that exists and is common and go “clearly, evolution has caused this trait to be—it is selected for, and must be an advantage somehow.” For example, one could claim with similar logic that we have no tail because that is advantage to us as a tail-less monkey; we must balance better, have louder and more frequent sex etc. all because we have no tail.
Nope. Like the appendix as an organ, all it really means is that the particular trait/behavior did NOT get you killed. Evolution works by accidents. Random mutation is the creative force. Natural selection then brutally eliminates all the accidents (mutations) that DON’T work. The rare mutation that creates an advantage is more likely to survive, but only as a probability function. As long as the trait/behavior from the mutation does not actively get you killed before you reproduce, it will survive. Plenty of mutations do. The appendix does. So claiming that vocalization and other sexual adaptations were selected for is not necessarily true—it could be a happy accident in the common ancestor we, chimps and bonobos share. Since all of us are by and large apex predators, unlikely to be fucked with by lions and tigers even if we are going all “Harry and Sally” in the jungle during sex, it persists because it doesn’t get us killed. Calling vocalization during copulation a selective advantage, especially an advantage because it facilitates promiscuity as Ryan and Jetha argue, is a bit of a stretch based on the actual evidence and how natural selection really functions.
One last point about Ryan and Jetha’s book. Let’s assume for a second that they are right, and humanity is more stable, less anxious, with a fully polyamorous society. Like in [Name Redacted]’s quote at the beginning, everyone is happier having sex with everyone else. As Ryan and Jetha state in their book, it’s kind of “cool story bro.” You can’t unwind the agriculture clock if agriculture was really the sexually-oppressive-patriarchy-causing source of much of humankind’s misery. We have too many people. Further, as Ryan stresses in his Ted Talk, their observations apply not to promiscuity among strangers, but among close knit hunter gatherer groups together for life. In as mobile a world as we now live in, let alone the anonymity afforded by the internet, we encounter far too many strangers daily to go back towards hunter gatherer now. In fact, we encounter far more strangers than our ancestors did at any point in the hunter gatherer past. This is why studies have shown that you really only meaningfully interact with and can keep track of about 150 people at any one time. That limit to people your brain can reasonably track is why some friends fade with time and distance as your brain has to replace them with people you see more frequently. Where we go from here if Ryan and Jetha are correct is unclear. Maybe it is simply recognizing the shape and breadth of human societal organization and sexual mores. That is the point Ryan emphasizes at the end of the talk. Okay then. Noted.
On the other hand, if you find their argument compelling, as they lay out basically why everyone should get laid by everyone more (less war! less patriarchy! more sex!), what does that really look like? It sounds like utopia. More sharing. More love. More peace. Less war.
Crank the volume on this (you know the song and it’s safe for work): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOGEyBeoBGM
In the world of Ryan and Jetha taken to its logical extreme conclusion, you would have no more incel problem: https://www.vox.com/world/2018/4/25/17277496/incel-toronto-attack-alek-minassian
There’s just one small catch I want to point out.
You ladies would have to bang even the uggos and the weirdos.
Because otherwise, this kind of highly promiscuous society would make the incel issue worse. Think about the likely reaction of a guy who still can’t get laid in a society where everyone gets laid and it’s no big deal. You have an incel culture because these guys already feel entitled to you. Imagine what happens when you move to a society where they actually are entitled to you because sex with everyone else is expected and the norm.
My sense is that most women would prefer to remain selective about their sexual partners, if not only for the time probability risk of pregnancy by Hot But Dumb as described above, but some dudes are just gross and you don’t want to sleep with them. Think about that dude that you know whom you would never, ever, in a million years, ever sleep with. You know. That dude. That total creeper dude. Well, in a society taken to Ryan and Jelda’s extreme, that guy would still need to get laid for social cohesion and as a social norm—and you might have to do it. Especially if you were in a small hunter gatherer tribe with them.
Let’s get the song back for THAT idea! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOGEyBeoBGM
Sorry Belinda.
Arguing against my clear self-interest as a guy, I’m not sure that a society that encourages, if not requires, you to be less selective and more frequent with your partners is quite as liberating as it seems on paper.
Ultimately, I am not sure how much or how radical a re-think of human sexuality is necessary as a result of this work. We know that the majority of human societies in all forms of technological development have aimed towards monogamous pair bonding most of the time, with genetic evidence of a little less than monogamous dalliance with Hot But Dumb. We already know what a wide array of sexual possibilities and proclivities are indulged by humankind at times.
Hell, we just ran the pregnancy time probability experiment with you, and we saw your wide array of possibilities and proclivities. Literally just now.
So, I dunno, not exactly the radical redefinition of sex and suggestion that we definitely -must- adopt a different pattern of behavior to be healthier, as some of their book reviews would suggest.
6) The part where I link some podcasts you really should check out
—Dr. Robert Schoch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vka2ZgzZTvo This was just fascinating, beginning to end. If the human population bottleneck (humanity was down to ~100,000 individuals at one point—we were an endangered species!) had occurred around 10,000 BC like it apparently should have based on Schoch’s evidence, my mind would be totally blown. But the human bottleneck was like 50,000 BC. So my mind is only partially blown by Dr. Schoch. You still won’t look at ancient Egypt the same, I promise.
—Dr. Paul Stamets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ Also super fascinating, but fair warning, I have never met a mycologist who was NOT a little different (no offense to any mycologists out there). He is no exception. But interesting talk from beginning to end nonetheless. And yes, my man is wearing a mushroom as a hat in this video. Like I said, mycologists. So just remember as you’re watching this, in the Ryan and Jetha utopia, you may have to get naked with the guy wearing a mushroom hat.
And. Rock. His. World. Ladies.
“Leave the mushroom hat on.” Rrrrrowr.
Sorry Belinda. And sorry Ryan, Jetha and [Name Redacted]. Your solution sounds great until you realllllllly think about it…
In closing…
The weird world of mycology: https://www.pinterest.com/thingofinterest/biology-fungi-lichen-moss/
Apropos of the Golden Age of Propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgztPP_CWNQ
Talk to you later