As to the question of the existence of “free will”, can you give an example of evidence you would accept as proof that it does exist? It seems to me, that your argument boils down to the assertion that some notional thing called “the will” or “I” cannot make a decision, only a physical system can, and therefore, physical systems make all decisions. Then, since the only objective evidence for “the will” and “I” is the decisions they make, and you will not allow that they could possibly make decisions, they must not exist. Setting aside the question of how you might hope to convince “me” that “I” don’t exist, you have basically assumed what you claim to demonstrate.

The subjective evidence for “I”, at least, seems quite strong. It may be that my “free will” is a delusion, but whose delusion is it? DesCartes addressed this issue some time ago, fairly conclusively, I think. He no longer exists, by the way, but I believe he once did.

In any case, whether decisions are made by minds having free will, or brains controlled by the inexorable laws of physics, it seems evident that plenty of people, myself among them, have been dissuaded from various actions on the grounds, not that they were morally wrong, but that they were legally risky. Like, they can put you in jail for doing that! So, maybe we don’t have “free will”, but we sure as Hell act as if we do. Which, in turn, implies that the laws should be framed on the assumption that we do. Always supposing that the laws mandate behavior we find desirable. Does “desire” exist?

‘You don’t control your brain; your brain controls you’

Incorrect, you ARE your brain, there are not 2 different you’s

“People continue to become overweight”, “people continue to get high”, “people (mostly men) continue to cheat”
….yet all of a sudden “our brains are organic computers that generate outputs based on inputs. The threat of punishment if one breaks to law is one of these inputs that the brain weighs in making decisions”…so do incentives matter, or not? (and of course there are examples of people losing weight, people stopping smoking shit and men learning that being faithful to the right woman is its lifetime reward.

And of course people are determined by their genes and experience so procreation of killers (not self defense) and pedophiles needs to be prevented.

[…] Two paths to civilization. Really, g is “substantially heritable”. What inclusive fitness means. Gene-culture coevolutionary theory. Collectivity and contagion. Some gentle transhumanist satire. […]

Dunning kruger effect applies everywhere.

Douglas MacArthur: Arrogant, many failures in reality, life to age 84

Matthew Ridgway: self-discipline, loyalty, selflessness, modesty, and willingness to accept responsibility and admit mistakes (a quality of scientist), few failure in reality, life to age 98.

You pretty much can figure out who has higher IQ for these two men. But the idiot got more fame due to self-bragging big mouth which is repected by similar idiotic mass.

[…] might very well be whatever domestication package went along with rice farming in southern china as peter frost has discussed. others undoubtedly include the sorts of civilizations described by cochran & harpending in the […]

Razib Khan’s prose style now is much more natural than it was years ago.

How similar are Finns to Estonians?

I believe Finns do show evidence of an Asian component in their genome. It’s not as much as Lapps though. Finnish Lapps are about 20% Asian and Russian Lapps 30%. However Hungarians are not much different genetically from other East Europeans. Apparently there weren’t enough Magyars to have much genetic effect.

I’ve heard that Finns are shy. East Asians tend to be very shy.

Also perhaps high intelligence, relatively low creativity?

http://meinnaturwissenschaftsblog.blogspot.com/2014/07/solving-puzzle-of-why-finns-have.html

The video of the post #3 shocked me greatly as a Finn as I ended up picking the same answers as the Asians. Both of my mother’s and father’s family tree side has been collected few centuries backwards and they have lived, to my knowledge, pretty much in Finland and I’m not aware of any racial mixing either (and such isn’t seen on anyone’s looks). The same pattern continued in the 2nd part. http://tune.pk/video/1802041/west-and-east-cultural-differences-22

Only really disagreement I would say was with the art and maybe writing (not really closer look on it on the videos). I found myself preferring the western art view… be it that I’m prejudiced by being used it or not. Or was it superior in quality. Who knows. I did agree with the more philosophical Asian outlooks presented especially on the 2nd part as a way I’m inclined to think myself too. (note: I have never really done any reading on such topics… it’s just something I have come up myself.)

Especially I was surprised so greatly because I had read last year a book review of the book in question and not noticed this pattern (but then again those certain examples as seen in the videos were not presented on the review, 11 pages). http://www.toqonline.com/archives/v6n1/61-Jones.pdf

Thought the reason for my writing isn’t about me but of the thought this let me into. Finns are sometimes considered to be the odds ones of Europe. Perhaps my line of thinking in more common in Finland if not the majority… this could explain why Finns are sometimes seen so different even thought they look European. Finns have low levels of immigration compared to most of the other European nations (I believe North-eastern Asian countries are similar in this aspect).

IC said on post #33 that “East Asian are more self-critical and tend to underestimate themselves. They focus on the own flaw and weakness more than others. If you see negative report of East Asian, you should take it with grain of salt.” This line of thought could be applied to Finns too.

I’m wondering has Frost or someone else studied the Finns more closely to see if they indeed have a lot in common with Northeast Asians in term of what happens in the mind? If so I suspect this could explain a lot about Finland. Could be interesting.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-58-of-worlds-japanese-speakers-white-23year,35690/

Peter, mirror neurons and affective empathy would seem to give a powerful effect to activities such as group singing, ritual, military drill and (don’t laugh) line dancing.

that’s freaky, i keep choosing the same answers as the easterners automatically… must be my wapanese side coming through!

Stan, Indians did get a raw deal. They didn’t ask for smallpox, confrontation with a more advanced civilization, forced relocation, etc.

Sure, they were brutal toward each other. I think Ronald kind of glosses over some of that, and he ignores the fact that being an Indian woman was no bowl of cherries. If there’s anything that strikes me as fantastical about what he writes, it’s these claims of Indian matriarchal society. I ascribe that to a reaction against the moral condemnation Indians were unfairly subjected to for not honoring their women to the same extent the Anglos did, which is an extremely high bar — nobody else on earth took veneration of the female to the Anglo extremes of the 19th century (Qing dynasty Chinese officials took note of this and found it very peculiar). And also, Ronald isn’t an Indian – he’s an Anglo American – so you can’t blame them for what he writes.

I live near a lot of Indians, and there’s still some overt hostility toward whites, but it’s pretty pathetic, and mainly expressed by the full-bloods who have been tossed off the rez for drunkenness (so the state rather than the reservation has to pay their welfare) while the half-breeds and their white spouses get fat off the casino revenues.

There are some things my ancestors did to Indians that were pretty lousy. And some things that were done to my ancestors, by Indian and Anglo alike. One thing I can say is that if I were an Indian, I would be pretty ambivalent about the “progress” of the last couple hundred years. In fact, I often feel that way as a white guy. We’ve all lost a lot on the way to modern society, and some of it was probably worth keeping. If you spend some time in the natural splendor of the West, you’ll know what I mean.

If there’s anything that could mitigate some of the awful things that happened, I think we could start by admitting that there was intrinsic human value to Indians and their way of life. Because it’s true, it shouldn’t be too hard. And we don’t even have to condemn ourselves to do so, because we can honestly relate.

IC In western culture, self-actualizers (elites) are able to laugh or make fun of themselves. The people who are yelling proud american, some thing similar are tend to be from low end of society. The self-critical people tend to be the smart ones.

One scale measure of arrogance, as a personality trait rather than cognitive error (thinking you’re better than you are because you don’t know much), is the Honesty-Humility index.

It has no relationship with IQ, but tends to be lower (more arrogant) in people who seem to show higher creative accomplishment.

http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/p_silvia_cantankerous_2011.pdf

In this context though, Honesty-Humility, a tendency to avoid greed, behave modestly, be socially disfluent, sincere, is separated from Agreeableness, the tendency to be forgiving, gentle, tolerant. So in this context, angry and intolerant personalities quick to take offense have no advantage on creativity, but those who tend to be grasping, arrogant, socially adroit and deceptive are more creative. Holding IQ constant, the more arrogant will probably tend to be more creatively productive, the more humble the more creatively paralysed.

The really lovely thing for Amerindian chauvinists is that “oral history” is whatever they SAY it is. If I, as a WigwamTeepee Tribe member, say that my tribe and all its neighbors were peaceful loving people who just drank pure water, ate only animals expired of natural causes, and gathered with other tribes only to hold hands and sing happy songs, then what right have YOU, an evil white man, to say otherwise? Your words on paper mean nothing compared to my sacred “oral history” and my people were angelic in all respects until your evil ancestors showed up.

This is our present state of affairs. Whites must condemn everything our ancestors did. “Native Americans” are entitled to lecture us on morality. To claim otherwise is to be racist. Having relinquished our pride and admiration for our heritage and accomplishments, we must be lectured to by peoples who never developed written languages, ate one another, and thought nothing of barbarism even modern cinema would shun. Look at the rage directed against Mel Gibson for his film on the Mayans. And if I recall, he didn’t come near depicting the worst of the barbarity.

I started keeping a small farm about a decade ago and learning to care for the animals has been a rich experience. I’ve wondered several times about the impact of animal husbandry on human moral instincts. The need to stick up for the little guy, for example, applies to lambs, too, so that when I see an abandoned one, a moral indignation kicks in, motivating me to save it. I feel that I have a duty to my animals, to allow them to self actualized. I mete out justice. A ewe that abandons her offspring for no apparent reason is more likely to become mutton. Maybe the huge advantage bestowed upon those with empathy for animals in more successful food production helped develop more empathy all around.

Is affective empathy only something that applies to distress and pain?

Apparently. The heritable components of empathy seem to center on the transfer of emotional distress

There is also ‘affective’ vertigo, as one might call it, or ‘sympathetic vertigo’, as I usually call it. I had assumed this was due to ‘mirror neurons’ and that empathy was built on the same basis. But if the ability to experience symapthetic distress has been specifically selected for does that imply that sympathetic vertigo has too? One wonders if there are racial differences in the tendency to experience sypathetic vertigo. Something which, for once, wouldn’t be that hard to test.

I get sympathetic vertigo sometimes when my cat jumps onto our third story handrail. And I don’t even particularly mind heights.

I didn’t say clans weren’t important. But I don’t see how they’re that relevant in these particular cases of the baby being ignored or the girl falling through the sidewalk being helped immediately. If clans are the dominant factor, how would that explain both these cases?

The impression seems to be that this incident occurred on an ordinary street with regular car traffic in which a person lying on the street will be assumed to have been hit by a car or in immediate danger of being hit by a car. That wasn’t the case. This was in a market area without ordinary car traffic. As I mentioned, it’s not unusual to see little kids running around or simply sitting or lying about unattended in these types of markets and public places in China. Part of the reason they don’t regard it as their business is because they don’t have to. Unattended children are commonplace and generally not a cause of concern. Manhattanites don’t have this attitude because seeing unattended children is rare in New York and other American cities, and cities are regarded as dangerous places and unaccompanied minors are generally perceived to be in immediate danger.

Behaviour is culturally determined, but only for those with a high dopamine gene variant.

Here’s another link on the incident: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8830790/Chinese-toddler-run-over-twice-after-being-left-on-street.html

And Wikipedia’s coverage of the same: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wang_Yue

The common attitude seems to have been that it was none of their business. Of course you might say that the same attitudes are found among Manhattanites, but you would be wrong. At the village level especially clans are important. And of course it is in villages that until recently the overwhelming majority of the Chinese lived. Not enough time for gene-culture evolution. I question Peter’s conclusion on this particular point.

A great source of information about all things Chinese is here: http://factsanddetails.com/china/

However, two of her four children inherited her preternatural ability to know how others feel, but they definitely didn’t exhibit the empathy, so they had free rein to manipulate people, which they did with a skill that you’d have to see and know them personally to believe.

If it’s genetic then I’d say that would take (at a minimum) three components.

1) A component conferring exceptional ability to spot distress even if highly disguised.
2) A second component which creates an *involuntary* reaction to that distress.
3) A third component that can switch that involuntary reaction off.

So if it was genetic maybe your grandmother had (1) and (2) and the kids got (3) from their father (among other possibilities).

You can see how the first two would be beneficial for mother-baby specifically and adult-child generally and (3) could be useful in hunting, butchering and war.

#

If the three components were genetic and independent the combos would be:

If a person didn’t have (1) the rest wouldn’t matter as they wouldn’t recognize the distress in the first place (or perhaps they’d construct a logic based morality?)

However assuming for the moment (1) is required then:

(1)+(2): involuntary altruist
(1)+(3): predator
(1)+(2)+(3): altruist-predator

with the extent varying with the person’s individual score in (1), (2) and (3)

You do have a valid point.

Howerver

Dunning kruger effect applies to all people and all ethnic groups. In western culture, self-actualizers (elites) are able to laugh or make fun of themselves. The people who are yelling proud american, some thing similar are tend to be from low end of society. The self-critical people tend to be the smart ones.

Dunning kruger efffect only confirmed what Rushton already find on pattern comparison across major racial groups. Basically pattern difference across racial groups also present within the each groups.

At end, they are confirming what an old saying ” ignorance is bliss”

Truth is like a math answer which is the same result no matter what equations you use to solve it. For a given question, you can use either algebra or analytic geomtry, the result is the same. The truth or fact should be similar like math answer. All trained scientists should understand this prniciple. The truth can stand the test.

In real life, arrogant people are always idiots when you exam them carefully. I often call them superiority due to ignorance or studipity.

IC (East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities, and see underachievement as a chance to improve themselves and get along with others.)

I think the analyses by Sedikides which see this more in terms of defensive self handicapping in a low self esteem context generally tend to have more accuracy.

East Asian regions tend to have a pretty low forgiveness culture (difficulty accepting apologies, giving forgiveness, letting bygones be bygones), so people with unrealistically low opinions of themselves, who are not emotionally inclined to take even sensible levels of risk on their own performance, will tend not to take the risk of talking themselves up (even if its accurate) for fear of retribution.

The confident and tolerant culture of the West (probably in particular Americans) is very much the opposite – people will embrace positive views of themselves, often unrealistic and fragile positive views, because their experience shows them that if they are found out, the response will be temperate, reasonable and proportionate (although maybe some of a bailout culture is a negative side of this).

Fundamentally though, underneath all this, East Asia tends to have a striving culture though, as most people with real experience of China know (hence dearieme’s “Have you actually met any Chinese?”). There’s a reason that developing and developed asia is classified by advertisers as a region of ambitious, status conscious, power seeking strivers and joy seeking hedonists http://tinyurl.com/n76yss9 (as opposed to Westerners who advertisers appeal to as people focused on overly romanticized personal relationships and pretentious ideas of their own creativity).

Chinese are quite willing to use guanxi and social relationships to get where they’re going, without real motivation to help those people more than suit their own self advancement. People really are all out for themselves, and maybe their nuclear family. They’re just insecure and anxious about themselves, so give “humble” responses and tend to a self help type attitude on their weak points (like all anxious people who are nonetheless status striving and self interested).

Prefacing your point with personal history really doesn’t do a lot to help your argument.

This is a very interesting topic.

I wonder if there are any of these behavioral traits where the difference in the average scores of East Asians and Euros is caused by a difference in the average scores of males and females – that is are there examples of a particular trait with scores like

East Asian and Euro males 5/10
East Asian females 6/10
Euro females 7/10

European Americans place a strong normative emphasis on independence of the self from others, whereas Asians put much greater emphasis on interdependence of the self with others.

The truth is that the forward thinking private American Christian culture has a good working balance (a golden mean) between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group.

Philosophy, wisdom, and knowledge has taken over genetic material in directing this fine balance.

There was a pre-existing trade network in both the Roman and Persian parts of what became the Arab trade network so they mostly just glued the two pre-existing parts together when they conquered both.

Also a lot of long distance trade involved extended families setting up in a chain along the trade route in question e.g. a merchant family in Antioch send their cousins to settle in the chain of towns between them and the town they are trading with precisely because they don’t trust people in between.

Nisbett’s book Geography of Thought has some great data on the differences between Westerners and East Asian. Interestingly, he states that the differences are 100% cultural, with zero genetic factors at work. Still, a useful guide to the differences (noun vs. verb thinking, etc.)

Apparently. The heritable components of empathy seem to center on the transfer of emotional distress:

“Comparisons of the responses given to these items by identical and fraternal twins in the Loehlin and Nichols investigation revealed evidence of significant heritability for characteristics associated with the two affective facets of empathy—empathic concern and personal distress—but not for the nonaffective construct of perspective taking. This pattern is consistent with the view that temperamental emotionality may underlie the heritability of affective empathy.

If so, that’s kind of dispiriting.

Now, I know that anecdotal evidence is not scientifically valid, but I tend to see behavioral/psychological genetics as similar to medicine in that it remains as much art as science, so I’m willing to use my own family experience as a sort of rough guideline.

My mother, as I mentioned before, is from a mainly Scots Irish family. They are not “bad” people, but they can be rough and unforgiving, and very competitive. It has served them well in the contemporary American culture, with one very tragic exception (a suicide of a child). They don’t have much in the way of affective empathy, but they do have a strong (if simplistic) sense of morality. They effortlessly resisted the American cultural upheaval of the 60s/70s and went on to have successful careers and families.

My father’s family, on the other hand, was a particular mix one commonly finds in parts of the northern West and Midwest, being primarily Irish/Welsh and Norwegian. My Norwegian grandmother had such a sense of empathy that it seemed almost “psychic,” if I may use that term to describe how our people would understand it in the popular manner of speech. She would care for and foster not only all the neighborhood children, but the animals as well. The squirrels grew so bold as to run into the living room as they pleased, and the sparrows and raccoons became insufferable pests. It got to be such a problem that my grandfather had to secretly trap the animals and drive them to a remote location for release. If I or any other child felt the least bit bad, she knew it immediately and would comfort us despite our best efforts to hide our emotions. Everyone around the neighborhood viewed her as a sort of local saint, yet she was a Norwegian Catholic convert in a mainly Irish neighborhood.

However, two of her four children inherited her preternatural ability to know how others feel, but they definitely didn’t exhibit the empathy, so they had free rein to manipulate people, which they did with a skill that you’d have to see and know them personally to believe.

Because of this, I always assumed that there was some connection between empathy and “knowing” how other people felt. It seemed to me to be a sort of emotional intelligence that could go one way or the other depending on one’s moral framework. I chalked it up to the 60s counterculture vs. my grandmother’s traditional Christian mores. I suppose cognitive and affective empathy could be distinct, but wouldn’t one be ineffectual without the other? Is it possible that we are simply mistaking an emotional intelligence that has been channeled by culture for affective empathy?

The phrase “cognitive empathy” is an oxymoron — empathy is an emotion – cognitive implies logic – two different parts of the brain — animals with little cognitive skills have empathy – how about the words caring or kind or thoughtful – each implies some intellectual thought.

Of course universal “caring and kindness and thoughtfulness” also implies Christian culture (a private philosophical system of thought) — giving credit to Christianity is taboo in today’s pseudo-intellectual world. Today’s Western intellectuals do not have the cognitive capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff (or the courage). They cannot grasp the notion that Western culture still carries the baggage of primordial tribalism. The bad part of the West is its state tribalness – not its private Christianity.

The child wasn’t run over in traffic. It was in an indoor covered market where cars generally don’t go. Vans, small trucks, tractor type vehicles ferrying goods to load and unload in the market go through there. It’s not unusual to see little kids running around or simply sitting or lying about unattended in these types of markets and places in China. An unattended child isn’t perceived to be in immediate danger as he or she generally is in public places in the US and elsewhere.

Here’s a video of something that actually did happen by some traffic A girl walking on the sidewalk suddenly falls through the pavement and a driver and some pedestrians immediately stop to see if she’s ok:

Affective empathy involves a transfer of emotional distress, and not simply a reconstruction of another person’s emotional state.

Can it also involve a transfer of joy, anger, or even boredom? Is affective empathy only something that applies to distress and pain?

“There is a stronger tendency toward holistic attention, emphasis on social (versus personal) happiness, and suspension of self-interest.” Have you actually met any Chinese?

East Asian are more self-critical and tend to underestimate themselves. They focus on the own flaw and weakness more than others. If you see negative report of East Asian, you should take it with grain of salt.

Evidence of negative thinking of self among East Asian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

(East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities, and see underachievement as a chance to improve themselves and get along with others.)

In contrary, you are more likely overestimate yourself if you are non-East Asian. Even more so if you are stupid.

Another factor of east Asian humbleness.

http://www.apesantsandancestors.com/major-new-theory-on-the-impact-of-farming-on-social-psychology/

Most people from other cultures are more self-centered

You should always take negative report about East Asian with above information in mind. When East Asian said “we are no good”, it is form of self-pity to make other people feel better. Unfortunately, you instead treat it as sign of problem due to your different culture background. Your attitude of arrogance will not last very long if you live in East Asia.

In Western world, such behavior would be coined as `self-hate’ liberal. Keep in mind, western people who display such `self-hate’ are often elite. Coincidence? Not really.

This world is too complicated for simple mind people to understand.

” I sincerely can’t see the ‘difference between understanding that someone is in pain (and therefore feeling sympathy) and actually feeling that person’s pain’”.

How do you know what you are feeling?

“However, when Chinese were tested, it was a network involving both mPFC and TPJ that was activated to carry out the self-referential judgment. This suggests that Chinese participants spontaneously took perspectives of others when drawing inferences about themselves[...]

When European-American participants were exposed to emotional stimuli and asked to suppress their emotional expressions, they showed no decrease of LPP, indicating that they continued to experience the emotion induced by the stimuli even when they tried to hide their emotions on their faces. Interestingly, these participants show increased activity in frontal regions of the brain, indicating that they experienced a lot of conflict while trying to suppress expression of their emotions.

We observed a different pattern for Asian participants. When asked to suppress their emotions, these participants initially showed strong LPP spikes, suggesting that they indeed experienced certain emotions. But within a fraction of second, that increased brain activity dissipated, and there were no indications that the participants were experiencing any internal conflict. Apparently, our Asian participants had no problem regulating the internal emotions that had been induced by the impinging stimulus.“

I learned English and Mandarin at the same time. Children are comparative geniuses at learning language

Intuitively the difference between “cognitive empathy” and “affective empathy” seems pretty obvious although in a particular case it might be hard to disentangle their behavioral effects.

My sense, from reading a lot of books about China, is that the Chinese have no real sense (or a very weak sense) of the public good as we think of it in the West, epitomized in this sad story of a child repeatedly run over in traffic in a big city:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-15398332

Also I think clans and clan loyalties are more important in China than you seem to think. But I am no expert and would be glad to learn differently.

[…] But this piece, which is a complex look at the some differences between cultures that grow rice versus cultures that grow wheat (it’s not simple determinism, but expression, and it’s a fairly measured piece at that), has a fascinating beginning. In part, because I’be been spending a great deal of time lately thinking about kinship and how we express different ideas of kinship in modernity. […]

Non-native speakers in many immigrant communities had similar experiences during the earlier part of the 20th century. Many children were encouraged to learn English by being told not to speak their native language so that they would be accepted more readily. Others were told that they would not be taught their native language so that they would learn and adapt more quickly and thoroughly, somewhat akin to burning the ships to prevent return voyages.

@ Peter Frost

“born in China, Japan, Korea, or Japan”
Sorry, I think that you wrote “japan” twice

Right, that may be the case, but it seems that by “alarm and distress” Mencius means something else other than understanding.

When argument based on speculative information, it is still speculation at end. People do this kind of work usually under influence of ideology. I have said before. Ideology is only marginally better than religion for average people. Ideology and religion require its follower disregarding any facts contradicting their belief. Like Rushton said before, scientists with ideological belief harm their own work. A true scientist should not give a damn to ideology or religion.

Most typical example of pseudoscience from left is Gladwell’s work. Examples from right are plenty also most in form of racist forum.

I said before. Ideology and religion are guidance for stupid people to judge the world around them because they are just too stupid to figure out thing on their own.

Some smart people use ideology or religion as tool to manipulate the mass for their own gain.

Methinks the sweeping generalizations you begin your article with, are showing some cracks.

Yes, there were certain criteria that determined captives emancipation:

“In the long and disturbing history of Indian-White relations in North America there have been other Whites, men and women, who became full fledged members and shared the fate of the tribes in the struggle for survival. These, often, had been taken as prisoners when young, and they grew up with new siblings and new parents and a new, wide range of relationships. They were not discriminanted against because in the old world of the tribes skin color never mattered; what mattered were the expressions of one’s spirit and the voice of the heart. But adoption by a human alone was not enough. The adoptee had to open himself/herself to the spirit world of the specific tribe and had to be embraced by it. Thus, adoption was made final or was denied on the highest spiritual level beyond a first move made by adoptive elders” -Karl Schlesier PhD, professor emeritus of anthropology

Likewise, here is a captive torture story from Blackfoot oral history:

The Salish had captured a Blackfoot warrior and tied him to a post at the center of their camp. The community then had gathered to witness his death by torture. The point of the torture was to see if this warrior could be made to cry, as he was slowly cut to bits. If this could be accomplished, it could then be reported back to the Blackfeet people how their warrior was weak when faced with death. It would never occur to the Salish to send a false report of the man’s behavior when meeting his end.

As it happened, this warrior fully being cognizant of the purpose of his death ritual, devised a strategy to circumvent the intended outcome. When the Salish man with first right to begin slicing him with a knife had approached and proceeded to cut and taunt the Blackfoot, the Blackfoot had kept his cool and returned insults as to be so vile, the Salish lost his temper and swiftly killed the Blackfoot in a rage. And this fact of circumstance of death is what was reported to the Blackfeet people

I expect this is a bit different to motive behind the ideological torture of the Spanish Inquistion or the auto de fe practiced by the English who would go on to torture throughout their colonies to modern times.

If invading and crushing the infrastructure of numerous nations, to modern times, can be construed to be violence, I expect the Europeans, by far, outstrip the Native nations when it comes to cruelty of behaviors related to aggression.

You may have the last word-

Mr Frost, if you ever write up this and related subjects I’d be first in line to buy your book.

The weakest link of Peter’s “Two Paths” hypothesis is the so-called “affective empathy” vs “cognitive empathy”

“Affective empathy does exist in East Asians, but it is much less differentiated from cognitive empathy. There is a difference between understanding that someone is in pain (and therefore feeling sympathy) and actually feeling that person’s pain.”

Sorry Peter, with my intelligence I sincerely can’t see the “difference between understanding that someone is in pain (and therefore feeling sympathy) and actually feeling that person’s pain”, alongwith so-called “heritability of 68%” (Chakrabarti et al., 2013)..

There’s NO clear and objective line between them, let alone a reliable way to quantify them without resorting to detailed gene analysis. Hence Chakrabarti et al., 2013 is very troublesome to say the least in my view.

My initial detailed rebutal was as follows:

September 21, 2014 at 5:36:00 PM GMT-4

[email protected] said…

2 gigantic “crisis” staring at Peter’s emphathy:

…

http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/affective-empathy-evolutionary-mistake.html

BTW, obviously Panda has been in pain since September 21 , 2014, when will Peter start t0 fell it? lol

Numi. the Islamic empire relied on slaves to great extent, see here. For commerce and similar functions the Arabs used special peoples, such as Jews, to run things, see here. The birth of capitalism, double entry bookkeeping ect, had its origin in Italy, Venice and the Genoese made their money in the white (women) slave trade.

I have read that the real trouble started because the Inuit had furs which had become a very valuable commodity that could be traded to Europeans. Six of one and half a dozen of the other I suppose. It’s like who started WWs 1&2, a case could be made for Poincaré.

Peter, to the main issue, it is a fascinating study (and the high-dopamine variant of DRD4 link to alcoholism explains its prevalence among Koreans). I got a bit mixed above, but I think it seems to be showing there are gene variants for group cohesion that massively increase the effect of culture.-

“RECENTLY, we tested approximately 400 undergraduates at an elite American university. About half of them were of European descent, while the remaining half were native Asians, none of whom had spent more than 7 years in the US at the time. They filled out a series of self-report scales designed to assess their self-perception, self-esteem, and other aspects of independence, as well as their sense of interdependence. Replicating many previous studies, we found that European Americans were both more independent and less interdependent compared to Asians. Importantly, this cultural difference was quite pronounced for those Asians and European Americans who carried a high-dopamine variant of DRD4. In fact, among non-carriers of these high dopamine gene variants, the cultural difference was absent. It appears, then, that the high dopamine gene variant carriers play some kind of special role in sustaining the values and beliefs of their culture. [...] The resulting product is thus sociocultural as much as it is biological. We are approaching a whole new conception of what it means to be human.”

A well-known fact is that limbic system (including amygdala) produces impulsive behaviors not different from primitive animals. Actually primitive animals function depends on such system. Prefrontal cortex produces rational behavior associated with reasoning, conscientiousness, morality, forward planning or future orientation. Limbic system is inhibited by prefrontal cortex.

In more advanced species including human, prefrontal cortex have stronger control of primitive limbic system. People from higher social economical status (SES) also display strong prefrontal cortex inhibition of limbic behaviors. These are not speculation. These are neuroscience facts.

The flaw of your post is too much speculation. Too much connection is made with marginal information. You ignore the most important factor in economical development, and less impulsive behavior. This factor is intelligence (g factor/IQ) which is generated from prefrontal cortex. Strong g factor is associated with less impulsive behavior. The dots connect itself (g factor, prefrontal cortex, impulsive behavior).

Weak g (low IQ) indicates weak prefrontal cortex. Weak prefrontal cortex/strong limbic system exhibit more impulsive behavior and strong emotional display (certain ethnic groups are quite dramatic in their emotional display). Impulsive behaviors causes increased homicide and crimes. Impulsive behavior is disaster toward wealth building and long term economical success.

On the other hand, people of high SES display exactly opposite of those low IQ people all due to more developed prefrontal cortex.

My father was born in the US but in a German speaking community. The only word of English he knew when he entered the first grade was “Hello”. I once remarked to him how difficult it must have been to start learning English in the first grade. He was astonished by my remark and said that he didn’t remember the slightest difficulty in learning English. In no time at all he was teaching my grandmother how to speak English.

I missed the part where you explained what we are missing.

Hey Peter, we learn that ‘Civillization’ begin in the Near East (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Persia) and went to Rome after a few centuries, is there any explanation for what happened?

I’ll further note the inter-tribal violence levels were considerably less to the modern nations adhering to the civilized law of war, probably because they were more individual and tightly regulated.

Nay:

http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422155031&sr=8-1&keywords=war+before+civilization

Peter

Something the anthropologists were never really familiar with were two phenomena 1) the Native aversion to correcting wrong assumptions (people are supposed to figure out their mistakes for themselves and 2) telling Christians what they want to hear, it simply was a safer course of action in relations with Anglo culture. Going to this second point, insofar as the women abductions, I am well aware of Blackfeet tribal history and there was no shame whatsoever in these relationships. Nor were these ‘captive’ women necessarily native per se. The Blackfoot word for a Mexican woman is ‘Spy-e-aki’ and reflects the noted warrior White Grass’ incursions into Mexico in the 1840s, where the descent is still noted in family oral histories. And when one mentions ‘captive women’ in relation to plains culture, it should be noted (in a system with strong element of matriarchy) they were able to attain full rights and marry as they chose:

“Fallen Leaf: While Fallen Leaf was a Crow warrior, she was actually born to the Gros Ventre nation and was captured by the Crow when she was 12. After she had counted coup four times in the prescribed Crow tradition, she was considered a chief and sat in the council of chiefs. In addition to being a war leader, she was also a good hunter and had two wives”

“this genetic risk might be mitigated by cultural collectivism, which involves more caring social relations and support networks. ”

Caring social relations and support networks are not really characteristic of Chinese culture or most Asian countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, the West is more caring in terms of government, support network, even stuff like family relationships. Like Anglospherians often talk to their parents like they would a sibling or friend. Asians tend not to as much.

And yet Asians have a far lower rate of ‘neurodiversity’ than Westerners. Whether it’s depression, Aspergers, or whatever, these conditions are not as common outside Northwest Europe, even in Latin America, Middle East etc. If it affects 1/100 Westerners it affects like 1/500 Asians or Asian Americans. Just a point I’m making.

Nice article. Mr Frost is a better writer and more cultured man than the other ‘gene expert’ on this site.

Having immersed in the Blackfoot language community and residual original culture for much of my life, from adolescence, I am not surprised at all at the simplistic interpretations of non-western kinship systems. My long experience has been ‘western scientists just don’t get it.’ When the linguist Benjamin Whorf postulated the American Indians live in a reality invisible to western interpretations of reality, as far as I’m concerned, he was speaking of persons such as the author of this article. Perhaps a topic of a future essay but for the moment, I simple wish to draw the readers attention to the facts behind the Blackfeet tribe’s kinship system breakdown:

http://ronaldthomaswest.com/2013/10/06/modern-indian-society-2/

Additionally, I will note there was pre-conquest tribal law (from oral history) in the northern plains tribes absolutely refuting any proposition implying kinship systems determine another group to which a hunting-gathering or kinship group was not related, were not included in the 1st groups protective social order or tribal law. Inter-tribal relations and behaviors were governed by treaty between groups. I’ll further note the inter-tribal violence levels were considerably less to the modern nations adhering to the civilized law of war, probably because they were more individual and tightly regulated. The were no applications of impersonal combats such as we see in the modern world. The simplistic interpretations presented by the author are not true in some all-encompassing sense and making general assertions regarding hunter-gatherer societies is a disservice to persons sincerely wishing to understand cultures outside their frame of reference. Whether inter-tribal or intra-tribal, there were effective checks on violence across a wide swath of territories prior to the western culture’s pressures pushing the plains tribes out of their historic spheres of influence in relation to one another and followed with what amounted to a ‘final solution’ meant to crush these societies social order and deprive them of land and independence.

In East Asians, pro-social behavior is supported not so much by empathy as by notions of duty toward the community

Incidentally, the Chinese philosopher Mencius, whose interpretation of Confucianism is considered the orthodox one and served as the official state ideology for much of Chinese history, grounded his justification of Confucian ethics not on notions of duty but on the innate goodness of man and his sense of empathy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mencius#The_Four_Beginnings_.28or_Sprouts.29

To show innate goodness, Mencius used the example of a child falling down a well. Witnesses of this event immediately feel

“ alarm and distress, not to gain friendship with the child’s parents, nor to seek the praise of their neighbors and friends, nor because they dislike the reputation [of lack of humanity if they did not rescue the child]…

The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

Men have these Four Beginnings just as they have their four limbs. Having these Four Beginnings, but saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves.

This low level of trust restricts trade, keeping it bottled up spatially and temporally in marketplaces and family businesses. A true market economy cannot self-generate.

What does “self-generation” really mean here and what parts of the world does the statement apply to?

This is a good documentary on the cognitive differences between West and East based on Richard Nisbett’s work. Nisbett is interviewed in the documentary:

If I am reading this right, given different cultural upbringings in their respective homelands, those Europeans with high dopamine activity receptor types, and those East Asians with high dopamine activity receptor types, are the most dissimilar in their behaviour. So behaviour is culturally determined, if you have the high dopamine gene variants.

I don’t know how important “careful guidance and scaffolding of norm-congruous behaviors by socialization agents (e.g., parents, relatives, neighbors)” actually is compared to peer group socialisation. I think it is in his Better Angels Of Our Nature where Pinker talks about how immigrant children who spend most of their time speaking another language with their parents will pick up the local language and accent from children their own age in an incredibly short time.

“Cultural collectivism might therefore ‘buffer genetically susceptible populations from increased prevalence of affective disorders’ (p. 529), which in turn might lead to a relatively high prevalence of the short allele of 5-HTTLPR. (Kitayama et al., 2014)”

By my way of thinking that is putting the cart before the horse. Isn’t it more likely that cultural collectivism is what is being selected for, and the short allele of 5-HTTLPR forces people into cultural collectivism?

So dealings with non-kin are kept to the minimum necessary. This low level of trust restricts trade, keeping it bottled up spatially and temporally in marketplaces and family businesses. A true market economy cannot self-generate.

Pardon me if the above was meant to be a minor tangential point in the article, but I think it is demonstrably false. Through the European Dark and Middle Ages, the Arabs established one of the largest trade networks in the world, from Spain to Indonesia, spanning the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. This network included not just Arabs but Turks, Persians, Indians, Africans, Indonesians, and others. None of these societies stopped being kin-based or move away from family-controlled businesses, but they were able to reach out and establish a trans-national trade network that very much relied on trust.

I also think you minimize the importance of innovation. Northwest Europe gained a decisive edge in trade and commerce with the invention of modern banking and credit (in Holland and Scotland). The English wisely copied this innovation from the Dutch and went on to establish a worldwide trade empire.

[…] fellow proponents consistently put the lie to them: one commenter on JayMan’s blog (asdf, here) put forward an interesting “quandry,” that of his black girlfriend. She is […]

[…] How Much Hard Evidence Do You Need? – Quite pertinent at the moment, my post discussing the various bits of solid evidence for […]

[…] who vary in their evolutionary history. Well, has this been proven? Of course it has. [see How Much Hard Evidence Do You Need?]. “Heritability”, as the term is implemented in quantitative genetics, refers to the […]

“An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy” by Gunnar Myrdal was published in 1944. Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish Nobel Laureate in economics. This book argued that black social pathology and inferior academic performance were caused by racial discrimination, and that they were used to justify racial discrimination.

Gunnar Myrdal argued that when blacks were no longer discriminated against most of them would perform and behave as well as most whites. The book was published when it was likely to be most effective. The Nazi movement had discredited the belief that racial differences are significant.

Because in 1944 most blacks in the United States were discriminated against the book had an element of plausibility about it. Because blacks are currently discriminated in favor of with affirmative action policies, and because vast sums of tax money have been spent in efforts to bring blacks up to white levels, this plausibility no longer exists.

As the Nazi movement fades from living memory, as black behavior and performance continues to disappoint Dr. Myrdal’s optimistic predictions, and as more is learned about the human genome, the constraints of political correctness will crumble and fall. America will have a dialogue on race.

[…] How Much Hard Evidence Do You Need? | JayMan’s Blog […]

[…] […]

I just noticed the excellent advice you gave to asdf above – especially the part about moving to Maine! Would moving to Maine be part of his offspring’s shared (& unshared) environment?:) Lest you think i’ve become an environmentalist – much of that good Maine “environment” can be attributed to the genetics of Maine inhabitants:)

btw, you, hbdchick & westhunt have some of the finest commenters on the internet (i refer to some familiar names above). thank you to all for your well-thought out empiricism (which, i guess means thank you for your genes & the unshared/shared environments you create with them:)

now back to snark & sarcasm!

Just a general compliment for now. I’m impressed with your blog. Thanks for all the hard work. I’ll be dropping in now and then with comments because I find your blog very much worth following.

excellent post! btw, the visual word form area of the brain is a subset of what was formerly all facial recognition — we hijacked a part of that existing system/area for reading – hence the left over difficulty with letter reversals in some kids – formerly that region was mirror invariant – see a face from either side you recognize it as same face – so developmentally for some b/d/p/q are hard to keep straight, b/c they’re still retraining their brain to learn to notice the difference between those things! Stanislas DeHaene & colleagues have done much fMRI research in this area (in the field of dyslexia).

[…] How Much Hard Evidence Do You Need? […]

Reblogged this on Overexcitable and commented:
Excellent!

“There is no free will because your brain controls you.” But my brain IS me. Like saying “there is no free will because you control you”, i.e. there IS free will. Retards confused by wordplay.

I love how this excellent post begging people to consider the big picture, the next steps for society given this reality instantly degenerates into a fight over the existence of free will. You must get tired of it. I despise arguing so I wouldn’t have been as dogged in my responses as you have here in the comments.

For my own part, this post and the realizations it discusses are exactly the same as I’ve been grappling with as I move into middle age. I’ve had too many experiences with actual people to keep deceiving myself with a belief in tabula rasa or dualistic wishful thinking but this understanding also extends to the fact that others won’t (and sometimes can’t) change their minds. There may simply be no way to convince the public at large or even a significant fraction that this is true and if that’s the case, then the future of humanity may likely be more of the same, with better phones and faster internet (for some).

~S

But not identical genetics. I need not tell you that the Chinese in Singapore are not representative of the Chinese in China (doubly so for Indians in Singapore), yes? That the average IQ differs (108 Singapore vs. ≤105 China) is a clue.

It seems highly likely to me that a great deal of downward mobility has occurred in China over the last two thousand years, which has flushed out alleles that reduce IQ.

I am married to a Chinese woman from Hong Kong, but her ancestors are Hakka and from further inland. She is pretty smart.

I suspect that the small differences in IQ you mention are entirely environmental, on average.

你会不会说中文？

[...] -Anonymous. [...]

[...] But some of you may be thinking that “these are all stereotypes, right?” They can’t be true; they have to be misinformed or irrational, right? Wrong. As evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa points out, all stereotypes are true, statistically anyway. As he notes, stereotypes are what scientists call “empirical generalizations.” The trouble happens when people assume that stereotypes apply in every last instance, when they clearly do not. However, if there wasn’t some sort of statistical trend, the stereotype could not persist (not mention that the stereotype would probably never have become one in the first place). (Of course, there might be some good reasons why people sweepingly apply stereotypes the way they often do. I’ll discuss that in a future post). [...]

[...] How Much Hard Evidence Do You Need? [...]

If you consider how conditional probability works there actually is not anything stupid or irrational in judging another based on a properly formed racial stereotype (based on a statistically representative sample) provided you don´t know anything else about the other being judged besides race (or other category, like sex). Unfortunately a lot of people have a hard time updating their believes based on new information, which is what you should be doing (quickly) when you learn more about a specific individual.

[...] rarely or never a priori rule out heredity as being responsible for group differences (and indeed, evidence points to heredity typically being involved), it makes sense to research how heritable differences could be behind such group [...]

>They are typically shipped to the rubbish bin, especially when, as in this case, they don’t seem to add anything particularly useful.

So then why don’t you apply this to your own claim that free will doesn’t exist?

>It’s clearly not a “fact” however. Nice try though.

The correspondence principle means that at the macroscopic scale of a coin quantum mechanical effects are insignificant. Do you know of any other source where indeterminacy would occur during a coin flip?

>Sure, it’s an assumption, and any good scientist will freely admit that.

Yes, in order to do science we have to make certain assumptions. These are, however, the exact same assumptions that are not taken for granted in metaphysics. So, you can use assumptions like that one to support Kepler’s laws, but you can’t use them to deny free will.

>It’s up to proponents of a claim to prove that it is true, not the other way around.

Whether you claim that free will exists or that it doesn’t, the claim is not falsifiable.

>As for metaphysics…

Isn’t even about answering the same questions that science does. It’s right there in the name “meta-physics”. If it were about physical reality it would just be called “physics”.

>That reality is probabilistic is quite provable. (Can you tell me exactly which atoms in a radioactive material will decay and when?)

Notice you didn’t ask me a question about the physical world e. g. “will radioactive decay occur when the nucleus is bombarded with neutrinos?”. You asked me a question about what I personally knew. That’s totally irrelevant. If I told you that caloric was real would that make it true? I could use bra-ket notation to write out the the “wavefunction” of a coin, and tell you that I didn’t know for certain if it would land on heads or tails. Would that change the fact that a coin flip is based on deterministic mechanical processes?

But, hypothetically, let’s suppose I DID predict radioactive decay. Suppose we had an atom of U-238, and at every step of the decay chain I told you the exact yoctosecond you would register a count on your photomultiplier. Is that any guarantee that my next guess would be correct? Suppose that I had a deterministic theory and displayed a set of experiments I had done whose outcomes were successfully predicted by the theory. It might have well been that those outcomes were not predetermined, but that reality is in fact probabilistic(0.0001% vs. 99.9999% instead of 0% vs. 100%) and that I had merely gotten “lucky”.

>I hope you’re not seriously going to try to propose that metaphysics go toe-to-toe with science

It is metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science that define what exactly “science” is in the first place. To talk about them in a confrontational manner is nonsense.

If you want to know what philosophy has done for mankind, just look at the fact that prior to the 19th century the term “scientist” didn’t even exist. If you want to know what philosophy can do for mankind, it can keep people from using the word “science” to justify unfalsifiable, untestable, Not Even Wrong metaphysical conjectures.

“As he shows, what has been thought of as “free will”, the uncaused cause, simply does not exist. All human behavior is the result of physical processes that occur in the brain.”

There is simply no battery of experiments you could preform, no set of empirical evidence that could be gathered, that could disprove free will; It is a metaphysical, not a physical, concept. Nowhere in this post do you even attempt to make a metaphysical argument, let alone refute dualism, you just assume that the mind can be reduced to physical processes. It’s exactly the same thing Sam Harris did in his talk on the same subject.

This is the same mistake many people make with quantum mechanics. Since QM is probabilistic, and it’s the best theory we’ve got, they then go on to say that therefore reality itself must be probabilistic. One is free to believe this, but the claim that reality is probabilistic is not even hypothetically testable!

Whether it’s Niels Bohr vs. determinism, or determinism vs. free will, those who share their opinion with the notions currently fashionable will arrogantly declare that “science says”. It doesn’t. Science, if it is to be the study of the natural world, cannot lend its support for metaphysical speculations.

“There are two distinct meanings to the word ‘science’. The first meaning is what physicists and mathematicians do. The second meaning is a magical art … What is of harm is the blind faith in an imposed system that is implied. ‘Science says’ has replaced ‘scripture tells us’ but with no more critical reflection on the one than on the other. … reason is no more understandable this year than prayer a thousand years ago. Little Billy may become a scientist as earlier he might have turned priest, and know the sacred texts … The chromed apparatus is blessed by distant authority, the water thrice-filtered for purity, and he wears the white antiseptic gown … But the masses still move by faith. … I have fear of what science says, not the science that is hard-won knowledge but that other science, the faith imposed on people by a self-elected administering priesthood. … In the hands of an unscrupulous and power-grasping priesthood, this efficient tool, just as earlier … has become an instrument of bondage. … A metaphysics that ushered in the Dark Ages is again flourishing. … Natural sciences turned from description to a ruminative scholarship concerned with authority. … On the superstition that reduction to number is the same as abstraction, it permits any arbitrary assemblage of data to be mined for relations that can then be named and reified in the same way as Fritz Mauthner once imagined that myths arise. … Our sales representatives, trained in your tribal taboos, will call on you shortly. You have no choice but to buy. For this is the new rationalism, the new messiah, the new Church, and the new Dark Ages come upon us.”

-Jerome Lettvin: poet, electrical engineer, neurophysiologist