Percentages of Suffering and Death

Steven Pinker’s theory of decreasing violence is worth taking seriously. There is an element of truth to what he says. And I do find compelling what he calls the Moral Flynn Effect. But I’ve long suspected violent death rates are highly skewed. Depending on what is being measured and how, it can be argued that there has been a decrease in the rate of homicides and war fatalities. But there are others that argue these numbers are inaccurate or deceiving.

Even accepting the data that Pinker uses, it must be noted that he isn’t including all violent deaths. Consider economic sanctions and neoliberal exploitation, vast poverty and inequality forcing people to work long hours in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, covert operations to overthrow governments and destabilize regions, anthropogenic climate change with its disasters, environmental destruction and ecosystem collapse, loss of arable land and food sources, pollution and toxic dumps, etc. All of this would involve food scarcity, malnutrition, starvation, droughts, rampant disease, refugee crises, diseases related to toxicity and stress, etc; along with all kinds of other consequences to people living in desperation and squalor.

This has all been intentionally caused through governments, corporations, and other organizations seeking power and profit while externalizing costs and harm. In my lifetime, the fatalities to this large scale often slow violence and intergenerational trauma could add up to hundreds of millions or maybe billions of lives cut short. Plus, as neoliberal globalization worsens inequality, there is a direct link to higher rates of homicides, suicides, and stress-related diseases for the most impacted populations. Yet none of these deaths would be counted as violent, no matter how horrific it was for the victims. And those like Pinker adding up the numbers would never have to acknowledge this overwhelming reality of suffering. It can’t be seen in the official data on violence, as the causes are disconnected from the effects. But why should only a small part of the harm and suffering get counted as violence?

It’s similar to how one looks at all kinds of data. In the US, blacks now have freedom as they didn’t in the past. Yet there are more blacks in US prisons right now than there once were blacks in slavery. And in the world, slavery is officially abolished which is a great moral victory. Yet there are more people in slavery right now than there were during the height of slavery prior to the American Civil War. Sure, the imprisoned and enslaved at present are a smaller percentage of the total population. But for those imprisoned and enslaved, that is no comfort. For each person harmed, that harm is 100% in their personal experience.

It’s hard to argue that an increasing number of the oppressed is a sign of the moral arc of history bending toward justice. Even assuming violence rates are decreasing, a highly questionable assumption, morality is not and cannot be measured in percentages. Suffering is a total experience.

* * *

The Kosmos Trilogy, Vol. II: Excerpt A, An Integral Age at the Leading Edge
by Ken Wilber

58% of known foraging tribes engaged in frequent or intermittent warfare, but an astonishing 100% of simple horticultural did so.

Sex at Dawn
by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
p. 185 (from A Fistful of Science)

Only one of the seven societies cited by Pinker (the Murngin) even approaches being an immediate-return foraging society … The Murngin had been living with missionaries, guns, and aluminum powerboats for decades by the time the data Pinker cites were collected in 1975 — not exactly prehistoric conditions.

None of the other societies cited by Pinker are immediate-return hunter-gatherers, like our ancestors were. They cultivate yams, bananas, or sugarcane in village gardens, while raising domesticated pigs, llamas, or chickens. Even beyond the fact that these societies are not remotely representative of our nomadic, immediate-return hunter-gatherer ancestors, there are still further problems with the data Pinker cites. Among the Yanomami, true levels of warfare are subject to passionate debate among anthropologists… The Murngin are not typical even of Australian native cultures, representing a bloody exception to the typical Australian Aborigine pattern of little to no intergroup conflict. Nor does Pinker get the Gebusi right. Bruce Knauft, the anthropologist whose research Pinker cites on his chart, says the Gebusi’s elevated death rates had nothing to do with warfare. In fact, Knauft reports that warfare is “rare” among the Gebusi, writing, “Disputes over territory or resources are extremely infrequent and tend to be easily resolved.”

Steven Pinker: This Is History’s Most Peaceful Time–New Study: “Not So Fast”
by Bret Stetka, Scientific American

Still, there are many ways to look at the data—and quantifying the definition of a violent society. A study in Current Anthropology published online October 13 acknowledges the percentage of a population suffering violent war-related deaths—fatalities due to intentional conflict between differing communities—does decrease as a population grows. At the same time, though, the absolute numbers increase more than would be expected from just population growth. In fact, it appears, the data suggest, the overall battle-death toll in modern organized societies is exponentially higher than in hunter–gatherer societies surveyed during the past 200 years.

The study—led by anthropologists Dean Falk at The Florida State University and Charles Hildebolt at Washington University in Saint Louis—cut across cultures and species and compared annual war deaths for 11 chimpanzee communities, 24 hunter–gatherer or other nonstate groups and 19 and 22 countries that fought in World Wars I and II, respectively. Overall, the authors’ analysis shows the larger the population of a group of chimps, the lower their rate of annual deaths due to conflict. This, according to the authors, was not the case in human populations. People, their data show, have evolved to be more violent than chimps. And, despite high rates of violent death in comparison with population size, nonstate groups are on average no more or less violent than those living in organized societies.

Falk and Hildebolt point out Pinker’s claims are based on data looking at violent death rates per 100,000 people. They contend such ratios don’t take into account how overall population size alters war death tallies—in other words how those ratios change as a population grows, which their findings do. There is a strong trend for larger societies to lose smaller percentages of their members to war, Falk says, but the actual number of war deaths increases with growing population sizes.

Slow Violence
by Rob Nixon, The Chronicle

We are accustomed to conceiving violence as immediate and explosive, erupting into instant, concentrated visibility. But we need to revisit our assumptions and consider the relative invisibility of slow violence. I mean a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead incremental, whose calamitous repercussions are postponed for years or decades or centuries. I want, then, to complicate conventional perceptions of violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is focused around an event, bounded by time, and aimed at a specific body or bodies. Emphasizing the temporal dispersion of slow violence can change the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social crises, like domestic abuse or post-traumatic stress, but it is particularly pertinent to the strategic challenges of environmental calamities. […]

The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological—are often not just incremental but exponential, operating as major threat multipliers. They can spur long-term, proliferating conflicts that arise from desperation as the conditions for sustaining life are degraded in ways that the corporate media seldom discuss. One hundred million unexploded land mines lie inches beneath our planet’s skin, from wars officially concluded decades ago. Whether in Cambodia, Laos, Somalia, or Angola, those still-active mines have made vast tracts of precious agricultural land and pastures no-go zones, further stressing oversubscribed resources and compounding malnutrition.

To confront slow violence is to take up, in all its temporal complexity, the politics of the visible and the invisible. That requires that we think through the ways that environmental-justice movements strategize to shift the balance of visibility, pushing back against the forces of temporal inattention that exacerbate injustices of class, gender, race, and region. For if slow violence is typically underrepresented in the media, such underrepresentation is exacerbated whenever (as typically happens) it is the poor who become its frontline victims, above all the poor in the Southern Hemisphere. Impoverished societies located mainly in the global South often have lax or unenforced environmental regulations, allowing transnational corporations (often in partnership with autocratic regimes) the liberty to exploit resources without redress. […]

Our temporal bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems treated as disposable by capitalism, while simultaneously intensifying the vulnerability of those whom the human-rights activist Kevin Bales has called “disposable people.”

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
by Timothy Morton
Kindle Locations 2154-2174

When we can see that far into the future and that far around Earth, a curious blindness afflicts us, a blindness far more mysterious than simple lack of sight, since we can precisely see so much more than ever. This blindness is a symptom of an already-existing intimacy with all lifeforms, knowledge of which is now thrust on us whether we like it or not.

Parfit’s assault on utilitarian self-interest takes us to the point at which we realize that we are not separate from our world. Humans must learn to care for fatal substances that will outlast them and their descendants beyond any meaningful limit of self-interest. What we need is an ethics of the other, an ethics based on the proximity of the stranger. The decision in the 1990s, rapidly overturned, to squirrel plutonium away into knives and forks and other domestic objects appears monstrous, and so would any attempt to “work” it into something convenient. Hyperobjects insist that we care for them in the open. “Out of sight, out of mind” is strictly untenable. There is no “away” to throw plutonium in. We are stuck with it, in the same way as we are stuck with our biological bodies. Plutonium finds itself in the position of the “neighbor” in Abrahamic religions— that awkward condition of being alien and intimate at the very same time.

The enormity of very large finitude hollows out my decisions from the inside. Now every time I so much as change a confounded light bulb, I have to think about global warming. It is the end of the world, because I can see past the lip of the horizon of human worlding. Global warming reaches into “my world” and forces me to use LEDs instead of bulbs with filaments. This aspect of the Heideggerian legacy begins to teeter under the weight of the hyperobject. The normative defense of worlds looks wrongheaded. 39 The ethical and political choices become much clearer and less divisive if we begin to think of pollution and global warming and radiation as effects of hyperobjects rather than as flows or processes that can be managed. These flows are often eventually shunted into some less powerful group’s backyard. The Native American tribe must deal with the radioactive waste. The African American family must deal with the toxic chemical runoff. The Nigerian village must deal with the oil slick. Rob Nixon calls this the slow violence of ecological oppression. 40 It is helpful to think of global warming as something like an ultra slow motion nuclear bomb. The incremental effects are almost invisible, until an island disappears underwater. Poor people— who include most of us on Earth at this point— perceive the ecological emergency not as degrading an aesthetic picture such as world but as an accumulation of violence that nibbles at them directly.

To Imagine and Understand

In reading lately, my main interest has been on the distant past of ancient civilizations. But circuitous curiosity has led me to other views about where we are heading into the future. The two, of course, are related—how we perceive the past determines what kind of future we can conceive. Putting that aside for the moment, let me focus on the latter.

One book that has held my attention the past few days is Hive Mind by Garett Jones. It’s part of the IQ zeitgeist or rather a response to it, an attempt to bring in a larger context. He discusses the Flynn effect, although interestingly he doesn’t mention the moral Flynn effect. That is an unfortunate omission, as it directly relates to the book’s topic.

Steven Pinker first explored the moral Flynn effect. I’d highly recommend reading Jones’ book along with Pinker’s, The Better Angels of Our Nature. It isn’t a matter of entirely agreeing with either author. What is important is that a necessary discussion is finally being had and these two represent innovative attempts at framing the issue for greater insight and understanding.

A major point that Pinker makes is about the increase of abstract thinking. An aspect of that is the rise in the ability to think in larger and more inclusive moral categories. And also the corollaries of perspective-taking and perspective-shifting, sympathy and empathy, theory of mind, etc. The following is one example of that below in terms of the novel, the kind of thing that some would label as “fluff.” Pinker writes (Kindle Locations 13125-13143):

“It would be surprising if fictional experiences didn’t have similar effects to real ones, because people often blur the two in their memories. 65 And a few experiments do suggest that fiction can expand sympathy. One of Batson’s radio-show experiments included an interview with a heroin addict who the students had been told was either a real person or an actor. 66 The listeners who were asked to take his point of view became more sympathetic to heroin addicts in general, even when the speaker was fictitious (though the increase was greater when they thought he was real). And in the hands of a skilled narrator, a fictitious victim can elicit even more sympathy than a real one. In his book The Moral Laboratory, the literary scholar Jèmeljan Hakemulder reports experiments in which participants read similar facts about the plight of Algerian women through the eyes of the protagonist in Malike Mokkeddem’s novel The Displaced or from Jan Goodwin’s nonfiction exposé Price of Honor. 67 The participants who read the novel became more sympathetic to Algerian women than those who read the true-life account; they were less likely, for example, to blow off the women’s predicament as a part of their cultural and religious heritage. These experiments give us some reason to believe that the chronology of the Humanitarian Revolution, in which popular novels preceded historical reform, may not have been entirely coincidental: exercises in perspective-taking do help to expand people’s circle of sympathy.

“The science of empathy has shown that sympathy can promote genuine altruism, and that it can be extended to new classes of people when a beholder takes the perspective of a member of that class, even a fictitious one. The research gives teeth to the speculation that humanitarian reforms are driven in part by an enhanced sensitivity to the experiences of living things and a genuine desire to relieve their suffering. And as such, the cognitive process of perspective-taking and the emotion of sympathy must figure in the explanation for many historical reductions in violence. They include institutionalized violence such as cruel punishments, slavery, and frivolous executions; the everyday abuse of vulnerable populations such as women, children, homosexuals, racial minorities, and animals; and the waging of wars, conquests, and ethnic cleansings with a callousness to their human costs.”

What we imagine matters. What matters even more is what we are capable of imagining. The society we are born into either helps to develop or stunt our imaginations, both individually and collectively.

There is a complicated relationship between imagination and reality. For us to know and understand a fact, for us to grasp the relevance of data, we must imaginatively enter into a world of possible meanings and implications. That is a core part even of the scientific method. A hypothesis has to be imagined before it can be articulated and tested, either to be proven or disproven.

However, sometimes a hypothesis is also a prediction, sometimes even a dire prediction. Still, the person presenting a prediction doesn’t necessarily want to be proven right—some hypotheses are best left untested.

As I was thinking about this, I came across something else from yet another book, a collection of essays edited by Richard Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn. It is from the essay in chapter 6: “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis; or, The Temporality of Networks” by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Kindle Locations 3401-3419):

“To exhaust exhaustion we must also deal with— and emphasize— the precariousness of programs and their predictions. That is, if they are to help us save the future— to help us fight the exhaustion of planetary reserves, and so on— they can do so only if we use the gap between their future predictions and the future not to dismiss them, but rather to frame their predictions as calls for responsibility. That is, “trusting” a program does not mean letting it decide the future or even framing its future predictions as simply true, but instead acknowledging the impossibility of knowing its truth in advance while nonetheless responding to it. This is perhaps made most clear through the example of global climate models, which attempt to convince people that something they can’t yet experience, something simulated, is true. (This difficulty is amplified by the fact that we experience weather, not climate— like capital, climate, which is itself the product of modern computation, is hard to grasp.) Trusted models of global mean temperature by organizations such as Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) “chart” changes in mean temperature from 1970 to 2100.61 Although the older temperatures are based on historical data, and thus verifiable, the future temperatures are not. This suturing of the difference between past and future is not, however, the oddest thing about these models and their relation to the future, although it is certainly the basis from which they are most often attacked. The weirdest and most important thing about their temporality is their hopefully effective deferral of the future: these predictive models are produced so that if they are persuasive and thus convince us to cut back on our carbon emissions, then what they predict will not come about. Their predictions will not be true or verifiable. This relationship is necessary because by the time we know whether their predictions are true or not, it will be too late. (This is perhaps why the George W. Bush administration supported global climate change research: by investigating the problem, building better models, they bought more time for polluters.) I stress this temporality not because I’m a climate change denier— the fact that carbon monoxide raises temperature has been known for more than a century— but because, by engaging this temporality in terms of responsibility, we can best respond to critics who focus on the fallibility of algorithms and data, as if the gap between the future and future predictions was reason for dismissal rather than hope.“

In imagining what we fear, it opens up to the potential of imagining the alternatives, specifically that of catastrophe prevented or dystopia avoided. The dire prediction can goad people into action and maybe inspire them toward another direction, hope rather than dismissal.

Take the example of the Club of Rome report, The Limits of Growth. It was published in 1972, a couple years after the first celebration of Earth Day. There were many responses to it, including dismissal while others took it seriously.

The doubters claimed it was disproven because it never came true.

First, it apparently is unclear how many of the doubters read the report, as the predictions extended far into the coming century. The Rational Wiki states that, “It is often quote mined to make it appear as if it predicted total societal collapse by the end of the 20th century. Limits to Growth, in fact, offered various scenarios and a 2008 study has shown that the core predictions in its business-as-usual, or “standard run,” scenario trends have held true.[5]” As Matthew R. Simmons wrote (Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?):

“After reading The Limits to Growth, I was amazed. Nowhere in the book was there any mention about running out of anything by 2000. Instead, the book’s concern was entirely focused on what the world might look like 100 years later. There was not one sentence or even a single word written about an oil shortage, or limit to any specific resource, by the year 2000.“

At the Guardian, Graham Turner and Cathy Alexander quoted the conclusion of The Limits to Growth:

“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

And then they noted that, “So far, there’s little to indicate they got that wrong.” Considering the report was published in 1972, that next hundred years goes further into the future than I’m likely to personally experience, although the generations immediately following my own surely will.

Second, even if they actually had developed a model that showed under continuing existent trends there was one possible scenario of the world ending by 2000, the survival of civilization into the 21st century wouldn’t prove they were wrong. It could simply mean the the conditions changed and so the trends shifted. Anyway, it wasn’t as if they were making predictions as dire as imminent societal collapse. The report was pointing to various trends and mathematically modeled scenarios: If this, then what? Or if that, then what else? It was informed speculation, a rather modest act of imagination well within the bounds of rational argument and factual evidence.

The reason the Club of Rome report was on my mind is because my father mentioned it to me. He leans toward denialism or at least, as a mainstream conservative, a profoundly ideological mistrust and wariness. But that wasn’t always the case. Back in the crazy ’60s and ’70s, both of my parents were caught up in the mood of the times. The culture wars had yet to define all of reality and they were going through a liberal phase of their young adulthoods.

The first Earth Day happened when my mother was 25 years old and my father was 27 years old. It was a year before they had their first child, my oldest brother. And that first child was a year before the Club of Rome report. My father told me that the report depressed him, considering the proposed population growth and resource shortages. They had two more kids after the first (in 1973 and 1975), and I was the last. They decided to stop at three, despite wanting a larger family. They thought it would have been irresponsible to have more children on a planet that quickly was becoming overpopulated and overburdened, and even three was pushing it from their perspective.

So, the Club of Rome report changed their behavior. I imagine it changed many people’s behaviors. It is interesting that my father now sees that report as having been proven wrong. Wasn’t it’s purpose to alter choices made and hence to alter the results caused and costs incurred? Apparently, that is precisely what it did.

The early dire predictions might have changed the behavior, directly and indirectly, of possibly hundreds of millions of people around the world. Not to mention changing the behaviors of many in positions of power and influence, both inside and outside of government. Those effected, such as through wide-scale environmental regulations, would include the most (if not all) of the planet’s population, not to mention the biosphere itself and every ecosystem within it.

All of the major environmental policies came after the Club of Rome report. Take one example, that of air pollution regulation. It was in the 1970s that the United States the Clean Air Act. That severely limited the lead allowed in gasoline. It has since been credited for the largest drop in violent crime, and it should be noted that decreasing lead toxicity is also directly correlated with increasing average IQ, a boost to the Flynn effect and hence the moral Flynn effect. This pattern has been seen in countries all across the world, following their own regulations—although lead in gasoline only began to be restricted in sub-Saharan Africa less than a decade ago, 2006. Still, it isn’t even just about lead toxicity, as all pollution taken in combination leads to many externalized costs on the human level (and that is with environmental regulations in place):

“About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes a Cornell researcher. Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people, he says.”

That probably doesn’t even include ecosystem destruction, natural resource depletion, climate change disasters, and other environmental effects (increase of floods, droughts, desertification, poisonous algae blooms, malaria, etc).

Imagine that the Club of Rome report had never been written and never convinced the major governments to have taken any regulatory actions—if: pollution and environmental destruction had grown far worse than it is now, climate change and severe weather patterns had worsened, violent crime rates had shot further up, and the Flynn effect for rising average IQ had stalled. And imagine that multiplied across the entire earth’s population, a population growing exponentially faster (maybe already having reached 15 billion, instead of a century from now).

Yet that isn’t what happened. The Club of Rome report had a large impact, both on personal behavior and public policy. As a complex network of causal links and contributing factors, the collective effect (cumulative and exponential) magnified down the line might have massively altered the course of development, societally and environmentally. This might have helped to prevent or forestall negative consequences and challenging events. If the global population had grown even faster and environmental regulations had not been enacted in the major industrial countries, no one knows what might have resulted.

This obvious success of environmentalist ‘alarmists’ goes right over the head of the critics, i.e., denialists. The most famous of the Club of Rome critics, Bjorn Lomborg, lambasted the report a few years ago:

“Even in the developed world, outdoor air pollution is still the biggest environmental killer (at least 250,000 dead each year), although environmental regulation has reduced the death toll dramatically over the past half century. Indoor air pollution in the developed world kills almost nobody. Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no pollution and happy farmers and a future world choked by fumes and poisons from industrialization run amok, the reality is quite different. Over the last century, pollution has neither spiraled out of control nor gotten more deadly, and the risk of death from air pollution is predicted to continue to drop (see Figure 4).

“Who Cares?

“So the Limits to Growth project got its three main drivers spectacularly wrong and the other two modestly wrong. The world is not running out of resources, not running out of food, and not gagging on pollution, and the world’s population and industrial output are rising sustainably. So what? Why should anyone care now? Because the project’s analysis sunk deep into popular and elite consciousness and helps shape the way people think about a host of important policy issues today.”

Such willful ignorance is mind-boggling. It is a total lack of both comprehension and imagination. He can’t envision the possible futures of that moment in 1972. It is beyond him to consider what would have happened if we had continued on the path we were on with no decreases of pollution, resource depletion, population growth, etc. He treats the report as if it were a mere academic paper or, worse, a melodramatic fiction. It was always intended to influence people and yet Lomborg acts as if the world was predetermined to end up where we now are, as if our choices and policies are meaningless or inevitable, and as if moral concern and moral imagination have no power to inspire new possibilities.

Lomborg continues his skewering of those misguided ‘alarmists’:

“In the developed world, the push to eliminate pesticides has ignored their immense benefits. Going completely organic would increase the cost of agricultural production in the United States by more than $100 billion annually. Since organic farming is at least 16 percent less efficient, maintaining the same output would require devoting an additional 50 million acres to farmland — an area larger than the state of California. And since eating fruits and vegetables helps reduce cancer, and since organic farming would lead to higher prices and thus lower consumption, a shift to purely organic farming would cause tens of thousands of additional cancer deaths.

“Paying more than $100 billion, massively increasing the amount of the country’s farmland, and killing tens of thousands of people seems a poor return for avoiding the dozens of American deaths due to pesticides annually. Yet this is how the Limits to Growth project and similar efforts have taught the world to think, making people worry imprudently about marginal issues while ignoring sensible actions for addressing major ones.”

It doesn’t occur to him to consider the costs. Besides the environmental destruction to ecosystems and species, our over-reliance on chemicals is itself a contributing factor to the high cancer rates. Plus, the use of chemicals for farming has allowed less nutritious foods to be produced, as these new farming methods are destructive to the soil. On top of that, I wouldn’t dismiss the impact on species. Consider the honey bee with global populations decimated by pesticides. Our entire way of life is dependent on the honey bee. His entire argument falls apart at this point.

The old Chinese curse is to tell someone, May you live in interesting times. Presumably, that is a curse directed at younger and healthier people who will outlive the one uttering it. Maybe the times we live in are less ‘interesting’ than they otherwise would have been.

That is the thing about predictions. If enough people or simply the right people are paying attention, it can entirely alter the prediction. When making dire predictions, usually it is hoped that people will be motivated to take actions to prevent the prediction. So, the best dire prediction is the one that falsifies itself. But by its nature such a prevented prediction can never get credit for what it accomplished.

It is the opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess we could call it a self-denying prophecy.

That is the power of the moral imagination. But imagination is always at play, even when its power is misunderstood and misapplied.

In responding to denialists, Rex Weyler wrote:

“New York Times economist Peter Passel attacked the Limits book by conjuring false claims that all the study’s simulations “invariably end in collapse” and that the book predicted depletion of critical resources by 1990. The book, however, made no such predictions, and on the contrary, offered sound suggestions to avoid collapse. These facts did not deter the denialists.

““There are no great limits to growth,” U.S. president Ronald Reagan declared in 1985, “when men and women are free to follow their dreams … because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.”

“This inspiring Reaganism serves as the official corporate rebuff to any talk of environmental limits. Lomborg claimed: “Smartness will outweigh the extra resource use.” Dreams. Imagination. Smartness. Humans, the theory went, are just too clever to be restricted by biophysical limits.”

Imagination, instead helping us to understand reality, can disconnect us from the world around us. It can even disconnect us from our own humanity. The ruling elite in particular can come to believe, through technology and brute power, that they have become as if gods. They don’t bow down to reality. They create their own reality:

“The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.””

This goes back to Garett’s view in Hive Mind. In the ruling elite worldview, it is all about a self-empowered meritocracy. They assume they are the best minds, men of vision and action. Indeed, the ruling elite on average are high IQ and well educated. But as Garett argues, individuals can only be as good as the society they are part of.

Imagination has the potential to not only connect us to larger realities, larger webs of causes and greater visions. Beyond that, it allows us to connect to the world around us and the earth upon which we all live. Imagination is an immense power—we should be careful how it is used and for what purpose.

We need to remind ourselves that our world is built upon millennia of societal progress and millions of years of evolution. In doing so, we need to reimagine our place, as members of both human and nonhuman communities. We aren’t the center of Creation, no matter how smart we think we are.

Moral Flynn Effect?

What is causing the IQ increase over the generations?

It’s an important question, as the rise hasn’t been minor. I’m amazed every time I consider that the average IQ used to be what, by comparison to the present, would be considered extremely low intelligence, functionally retarded even if you go back a few generations from present living generations. If you have an average person today take an IQ test designed earlier last century, they would get results, relative to the results when the test was first given, that show them as being quite brilliant.

It makes one wonder what is measured by IQ tests.

This IQ increase is called the Flynn Effect. It was named after James Flynn who wrote a number of papers about it based on his international and cross-generational observations of testing, although Richard Zynn first observed it on a more limited scale in the Japanese population.

The Flynn Effect has been seen in both crystallized and fluid intelligence. The former is basically learned intelligence. This shows what you know and how well you are able to use it. The latter is more about how you are able to think, specifically abstract thinking and non-verbal problem-solving. It is the ability to deal with new and unique problems.

(As a side note, I realized how this applies to my own cognitive abilities. When I was youngr, I was delayed in my crystallized intelligence and precocious in my fluid intelligence. I was so delayed in the one that teachers initially thought I might have been retarded, but IQ testing showed that I measured high in pattern recognition and puzzle-solving. My strengths helped me compensate for my weaknesses. But if it had been reversed, compensation would have been much more challenging.)

The greatest and most consistent IQ increases have been measured in the fluid intelligence. No one exactly knows why, but explanations are diverse. Flynn sees it as primarily an increase in abstract thinking in line with the demands of modern industrialized society with all of its complexities: infrastructures, social systems, economies, technologies, visual media, video games, etc. Flynn points out how rural people even just a century ago didn’t demonstrate much predilection for abstractions (see Luria’s interviews with isolated rural Russians). With a different focus, others propose that the main change has been in terms of health standards and environmental conditions, that have allowed greater brain development.

The reasons interest me less at the moment. I wanted to note that the changes seen across the generations are quite real and significant, whatever they might mean. They are also continuing in many countries, including the United States, although the pattern doesn’t hold in all countries. We Americans haven’t yet hit the ceiling of IQ limits, and that applies to all demographic groups, although those on the lower end of the scale are rising faster and hence the IQ disparities are shrinking.

So, about this trend, what does it represent? Where is it heading?

There are some correlations that I find intriguing. Higher average IQ correlates to greater liberal-mindedness. Many studies have shown this. It seems related to corrleations found between other cognitive abilities and predispositions: openness to experience, thin boundaries, fantasy proneness, creativity, empathy, emotional sensitivity, social awareness, etc.

This probably connects to fluid intelligence, the ability to deal with new, unique, and unusual situations and problems. I’ve pointed out before that the strength and weakness of liberalism is its emphasis on abstractions, both critical thinking and wide-ranging empathy being dependent on this. There is a psychological fluidity with liberalism that appears to be linked to cognitive and intellectual fluidity. I’ve also noted this may be the reason that research has shown it easier to shift a liberal into a conservative mindset than a conservative into a liberal mindset. Liberals easily fall prey to contact highs, both psychological and ideological.

Unsurprisingly, liberalism (in particular, social liberalism) has increased in unison with rising IQ. Also, social democracy has spread and become more dominant following the wide-scale availability of knowledge because of movable type printing presses, mass publishing, public libraries, public education, etc; and is likely to spread further as all of these contributing factors spread further and are magnified by the internet and various new media technologies. Others have observed that the Axial Age began and came to fruition because of the development and popularization of alphabetic writing, scrolls and then bound books, and the formation of libraries. That beginning, uneven and shaky, did more fully take hold during the Enlightenment and greater still with industrialization.

Steven Pinker has made the argument that this corresponds to an impressive decrease of violence per capita across the centuries. This is what is called the “moral Flynn effect.” It’s not just an improvement of social and health conditions, but an actual change at the level of psychological and cognitive functioning, at least so the theory goes.

Fluid intelligence isn’t just about cold analysis, dry logic, and intellectual problem-solving. It’s more importantly about seeing patterns and connections and the ability to shift perspectives, such as ideological worldviews, ethnic cultures, and personal experiences. It’s not just abstract thinking, but it definitely involves abstract thinking. To empathize with someone far different from you requires an abstract capacity of universalizing human nature and seeking commonality in human experience. There is no way to go from concrete thinking to such inclusive extremes of empathy, to go from the known of one’s own experience and into the unknown of imagining other viewpoints.

You can see this mindset having struggled to take hold during the Enlightenment and early modern revolutionary era, and even well into the 19th century. One of the greatest debates at that time, including among the American founders, was whether all humans had a basic human nature. Did all people, even peasants and slaves, have a common experience of self-awareness, thought, and feeling? Did all people feel pain and suffering, desire happiness and freedom? Were all humans really the same on some fundamental level or were some populations more like animals?

These seem like silly questions to many modern people in modernized societies, but that wasn’t always the case. It has only been over this past century that psychological understanding has become common, and this has been in concert  with scientific thought becoming more widespread, the two being inextricably connected. To see the world through a stranger’s eyes requires a quite complex process of cognitive ability. It has to be learned and developed. No one is simply born with this capacity.

It’s amazing that we have advanced so far that we now take so much of this for granted. Still, we have much further to go. It does get me to wondering. Will we reach a tipping point when the American or global population reaches a certain level of IQ and education, specifically in terms of increasing ability of complex thought and perspective-taking? The average American today is smarter and more well educated than was the ruling elite from centuries ago. If you think the present generations of Americans are stupid, you should have seen their ancestors before most of the population was educated and literate.

On the other hand, some worry that increased abstract thought is causing a loss of concrete thought.But I doubt it is a zero sum game. By way of transcend and include, abstract thought moreso builds upon than replaces concrete thought. It’s that combining of cognitive abilities that allows for ever more complex thought. That is what I hope is the case. We are presently undergoing a massive social experiment to test this hypothesis.

* * *

See:

Are We Becoming Morally Smarter?
The connection between increasing IQs, decreasing violence, and economic liberalism
by Michael Shermer

Swords into Syllogisms
by Randal R. Hendrickson

A Ruling Elite of Well-Educated Sheep

Here is an interesting dialogue of articles about higher education. It is from The New Republic magazine.

The initial article is by William Deresiewicz. It is based on his book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. There were two critical responses I came across, one by Steven Pinker and another by J.D. Chapman. The last article is Deresiewicz’s response to his critics.

I didn’t care too much about the issue in and of itself. I don’t know enough about higher education to have an informed opinion, and so I won’t claim to know whether or not Deresiewicz makes sense about that issue. What interested me was the conclusion Deresiewicz offered, the opposition between a false meritocracy and a functioning democracy. That central point goes way beyond any aspect of education. It touches upon the root of nearly every problem in our society.

On this issue of democracy, Deresiewicz hit a raw nerve. I didn’t get the sense that Pinker grasped this aspect of the argument, as is indicated by his own conclusion where he seems to praise meritocracy in place of democracy. Pinker seems to genuinely believe in meritocracy, not just in theory but as it functions in our society. I get a bit of a reactionary vibe from Pinker (see this post by Kenan Malik, Human Conditions, and also notice how much attention Pinker gets by a popular neoreactionary like hbdchick).

Chapman disagreed with much of what Deresiewicz wrote. However, in his own conclusion, he supported the severe doubts about meritocratic claims.

In his final comments, Deresiewicz restates his basic case for an education based on an egalitarian vision. The only thing I wish is that he had grounded this into the larger problems we face with growing inequality, unemployment/underemployment, mass incarceration, structural racism, and a permanent underclass. What is at stake is far more than access to quality education for all citizens.

He does point in that direction, and so he is far from ignoring the implications. I understand he was purposely keeping his focus more narrow in order to deal with a single issue. His personal bias is from working in higher education and so that is where he naturally focuses his attention. That is fine, as long as the larger context is kept in mind.

 * * * *

Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League
The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies
By William Deresiewicz

“Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal. But in the end, the deeper issue is the situation that makes it so hard to be anything else. The time has come, not simply to reform that system top to bottom, but to plot our exit to another kind of society altogether.

“The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, not reproduce it. Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been advocating for years. Preferences for legacies and athletes ought to be discarded. SAT scores should be weighted to account for socioeconomic factors. Colleges should put an end to résumé-stuffing by imposing a limit on the number of extracurriculars that kids can list on their applications. They ought to place more value on the kind of service jobs that lower-income students often take in high school and that high achievers almost never do. They should refuse to be impressed by any opportunity that was enabled by parental wealth. Of course, they have to stop cooperating with U.S. News.

“More broadly, they need to rethink their conception of merit. If schools are going to train a better class of leaders than the ones we have today, they’re going to have to ask themselves what kinds of qualities they need to promote. Selecting students by GPA or the number of extracurriculars more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind.

“The changes must go deeper, though, than reforming the admissions process. That might address the problem of mediocrity, but it won’t address the greater one of inequality. The problem is the Ivy League itself. We have contracted the training of our leadership class to a set of private institutions. However much they claim to act for the common good, they will always place their interests first. The arrangement is great for the schools, but is Harvard’s desire for alumni donations a sufficient reason to perpetuate the class system?

“I used to think that we needed to create a world where every child had an equal chance to get to the Ivy League. I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education.

“High-quality public education, financed with public money, for the benefit of all: the exact commitment that drove the growth of public higher education in the postwar years. Everybody gets an equal chance to go as far as their hard work and talent will take them—you know, the American dream. Everyone who wants it gets to have the kind of mind-expanding, soul-enriching experience that a liberal arts education provides. We recognize that free, quality K–12 education is a right of citizenship. We also need to recognize—as we once did and as many countries still do—that the same is true of higher education. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it’s time to try democracy.”

The Trouble With Harvard
The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it
By Steven Pinker

“So why aren’t creative alternatives like this even on the table? A major reason is that popular writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, pushing a leftist or heart-above-head egalitarianism, have poisoned their readers against aptitude testing. They have insisted that the tests don’t predict anything, or that they do but only up to a limited point on the scale, or that they do but only because affluent parents can goose their children’s scores by buying them test-prep courses.

“But all of these hypotheses have been empirically refuted. We have already seen that test scores, as far up the upper tail as you can go, predict a vast range of intellectual, practical, and artistic accomplishments. They’re not perfect, but intuitive judgments based on interviews and other subjective impressions have been shown to be far worse. Test preparation courses, notwithstanding their hard-sell ads, increase scores by a trifling seventh of a standard deviation (with most of the gains in the math component). As for Deresiewicz’s pronouncement that “SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely,” this is bad social science. SAT correlates with parental income (more relevantly, socioeconomic status or SES), but that doesn’t mean it measures it; the correlation could simply mean that smarter parents have smarter kids who get higher SAT scores, and that smarter parents have more intellectually demanding and thus higher-paying jobs. Fortunately, SAT doesn’t track SES all that closely (only about 0.25 on a scale from -1 to 1), and this opens the statistical door to see what it really does measure. The answer is: aptitude. Paul Sackett and his collaborators have shown that SAT scores predict future university grades, holding all else constant, whereas parental SES does not. Matt McGue has shown, moreover, that adolescents’ test scores track the SES only of their biological parents, not (for adopted kids) of their adoptive parents, suggesting that the tracking reflects shared genes, not economic privilege.

“Regardless of the role that you think aptitude testing should play in the admissions process, any discussion of meritocracy that pretends that aptitude does not exist or cannot be measured is not playing with a full deck. Deresiewicz writes as if any correlation between affluence and Ivy admissions is proof that we don’t have a true meritocracy. But that only follows if the more affluent students are without merit, and without a measure of aptitude that is independent of affluence, how could you ever tell? For the same reason, his conspiracy theory of the historical trend in which Ivy students have been coming from wealthier families—namely that the Ivies deliberately impose expensive requirements to weed out poorer families—is glib. Hoxby has shown that the historical trend was propelled by students’ no longer applying to the closest regional colleges but to the ones with the most similar student bodies anywhere in the country. The law of supply and demand pushed the top schools to raise their academic admissions standards; the correlation with parental income may just be a by-product.

“After first denying that we have ever tried meritocracy, Deresiewicz concludes by saying that we have tried it, and now should try “democracy” instead, by which he seems to mean a world in which the distribution of incomes of Ivy League families would be identical to that of the country as a whole. But as long as the correlation between wealth and aptitude is not zero, that goal is neither possible nor desirable.

“Still, he’s right that the current system is harmful and unfair. What he could have said is that elite universities are nothing close to being meritocracies. We know that because they don’t admit most of their students on the basis of academic aptitude. And perhaps that’s what we should try next.”

Send Your Kid to the Ivy League!
The New Republic’s article against elite education is destructive to my students
By J.D. Chapman

“I agree with Deresiewicz that liberal arts colleges like Sarah Lawrence and Reed are uniquely positioned to nurture and challenge students, and I champion them when I can. I don’t believe the Ivies are for every bright kid, and I have occasionally counseled students capable of admission to them to favor other options. And I agree that class lines are hardening in dangerous ways; the Ivies have too much money and power; and meritocracy is a delusion. That does not mean that an Ivy League diploma isn’t valuable, especially for someone whose family has no history of access to elite careers like teaching at Yale or writing for The New Republic. It means that it is valuable. Whether it should be is another discussion altogether.”

Your Criticism of My Ivy League Takedown Further Proves My Point
By William Deresiewicz

“Nor was it—or is it—an either/or situation: Either a general, liberal arts education or a specialized, vocational one; either building a soul or laying the foundation for a career. American higher education, uniquely among the world’s systems, makes room for both. You major in one thing, but you get to take courses in others. The issue now is not that kids don’t or at least wouldn’t want to get a liberal education as well as a practical one (you’d be surprised what kids are interested in doing, if you give them a chance). The issue is that the rest of us don’t want to pay for it.

“That is finally what’s at stake here. Are we going to reserve the benefits of a liberal education for the privileged few, or are we going to restore the promise of college as we once conceived it? When I say, at the end of my book, that the time has come to try democracy, that is what I am talking about.”

Response to ‘Why are zealots so happy?’

Posted on May 29th, 2008 by Marmalade

I came across a recent blog post by C4Chaos titled Why are zealots so happy?. 

Basically, I do believe such presently uncontrollable factors as genetics do have a disproportionate influence on human experience and behavior, but I’m not sure how disproportionate it is.  This is something I’ve thought about a lot over the years and I did enjoy Seligman’s book even though I’m uncertain about his optimistic conclusions.  I want to look further into the happiness research to see what the latest evidence is showing.

C4Chaos touches upon how happiness fits into religion.  Here is the statistics(from the link in C4Chaos‘ blog) that relate to happy zealots(ie extremists):

Source: 2004 General Social Survey

I would add the morality angle.  What has troubled me over the years is how the ideal of The Good is inextricably tangled with feeling good.  And, yet, I sense they aren’t identical even though there may be an influence.  If there is an influence, does the influence go both ways?  I can imagine how feeling out The Good may help one to feel good.  But by seeking to feel good can we feel out The Good?

Here is an insightful paper that relates:
http://www.ksharpe.com/Word/EP20.htm
The Sense of Happiness:
Biological Explanations and Ultimate Reality and Meaning
Kevin Sharpe

Here is my response to C4Chaos:

I do think there is a connection between discontentment and questioning, and also between discontentment and creatively seeing possibilities.  This translates as unhappy people are more motivated to ask new questions and to seek new answers.  Of course, there is a point of too much discontentment and unhappiness that shuts the mind down.

Here is a nice dialogue between Steven Pinker and Martin Seligman.
http://www.slate.com/?id=2072079&entry=2072402

I’ve read one of Seligman’s books.  His view is that human choice is greater than genetics.  The limitation of his writing is that its basically pop psychology and its only moderately backed up by research.  One thing I remember is that pessimists have a more realistic perception of reality, but optimists have more ability to create a different future.  Its funny that the optimists delusion is what makes them effective, but you don’t want to ask them for objective understanding.  On the other hand, the pessimist knows precisely what is going on, but doesn’t know how or feel capable of changing it.  (Interestingly, I’m a depressed person and I value the straight truth more than anything including happiness… which conforms to this view.)

However, despite the pessimist’s useful ability to see reality clearly, Seligman believes that everyone should strive to be optimistic.  He does concede that society needs a few pessimists to ground the optimists’ vision. But, as I remember, he seems to optimistically think that the strengths of pessimism can be carried over into a more optimistic attitude.

Steven Pinker comes at it from a pure scientific perspective.  He limits himself to what the research says.  And his book isn’t meant as inspirational writing.  I haven’t read his book, but I have recently come across some of the research done on happiness.  Here is an interesting one:
http://www.psych.umn.edu/psylabs/happness/happy.htm
Happiness is a Stochastic Phenomenon
David Lykken and Auke Tellegen
University of Minnesota
Psychological Science Vol.7, No. 3, May 1996

Abstract
“Happiness or subjective wellbeing was measured on a birth-record based sample of several thousand middle-aged twins using the Well Being (WB) scale of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ). Neither socioeconomic status (SES), educational attainment, family income, marital status, nor an indicant of religious commitment could account for more than about 3% of the variance in WB. From 44% to 53% of the variance in WB, however, is associated with genetic variation. Based on the retest of smaller samples of twins after intervals of 4.5 and 10 years, we estimate that the heritability of the stable component of subjective wellbeing approaches 80%.”

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Tagged with: C4Chaos, Why are zealots happy?, happiness, unhappiness, depression, zealots, optimism, pessimism, heritability, genetics, biology, psychology, behavior, attitude, Martin Seligman, Steven Pinker, science, research, David Lykken, Auke Tellegen, Happiness is a Stochastic Phenomenon, wellbeing, personality, twins, socioeconomic status, status, educational attainment, education, family income, income, money, marital status, marriage, religious commitment, religion

 

 

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about 10 hours later

Nicole said

wow. very interesting. i wonder why people think zealots are happy? the ones i know are a pretty miserable lot actually…

 

 

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about 22 hours later

Marmalade said

Good question.  There is a lot of research out there, but I’m not a scientist.  Here is one paper that looked particularly interesting.

Religious orientation, religious Coping and happiness among UK adults

Christopher Alan Lewis, John Maltby and Liz Day
“In general, no significant associations were found between religiosity scores and happiness scores. However, both higher intrinsic orientation scores and positive religious coping were significantly associated with higher scores on the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire Short-Form. It is proposed that these differential findings are consistent with the theoretical distinction between subjective and psychological well-being. It is suggested that when religiosity is related to happiness, it is related to psychological well-being, which is thought to reflect human development, positive functioning and existential life challenges.”

Here is from the link in C4Chaos’ blog:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/the-politics-of-happiness-part-4/

“In the 2004 General Social Survey, 35 percent of people who said they were extremely liberal were very happy (versus 22 percent of people who were just liberal). At the same time, a whopping 48 percent of people who were “extremely conservative” gave this response (compared with 43 percent of non-extreme conservatives). Twenty-eight percent of people squarely in the middle – “slightly liberal” to “slightly conservative” – were very happy.”

“A happiness edge enjoyed by the extremes persists even if we control for the other relevant forces like income, education, race, religion, and so on.”

The conclusion of this author is based on 3 factors: evidence showing extremists as more happy than moderates, evidence showing conservatives as more happy than liberals, and evidence showing the religious as more happy than the non-religious.  He notes that conservative extremists are the happiest of any political sector and implies the connection with how vocally religious this group of people are.  Hence, religious zealots are happier.

The conclusion is fairly straightforward.  Any disagreements would be with the research he uses as evidence.  Is it accurate?

 

 

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about 22 hours later

Marmalade said

Here are some comments from this section in the series that C4Chaos was linking to:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/the-politics-of-happiness-part-4/

1. May 14th,
2008
11:43 am

I haven’t read all 4 parts completely but I wonder if this is true all the time. In other words, could the extreme be happy right now because of current conditions in our country? Extreme left: “Change is coming, yoo-hoo!” Extreme right: “We have beaten off terrorists and liberals for 7 years, who would have thought?!”

– Posted by Marcus Lynn
4. May 14th,
2008
11:55 am

Interesting… but isn’t it likely that anyone who rates themselves as “extremely” anything is likely to have strong views in general, and therefore more likely to put “very happy” rather than just “happy”. It would be interesting to see the above graph with numbers of people who are “very UNhappy”

– Posted by Charles
17. May 14th,
2008
2:15 pm

To follow on what frankenduf(14) said:
Psychological studies have shown that when people believe they have control over their lives and actions, they are happier; whether or not they ever exercise that control. Could it be that extremists, because they are more likely to be “acting out”, feel that they are in greater control? Moderates, on the other hand, “moderate” their views to accomodate multiple other points-of-view; in essence, ceding control, and increasing their discomfort.

A second, not necessarily contradictory, explanation would be that cognitive dissonance causes most frustration. Other psychological studies have shown that the more extreme our beliefs, the more likely we are to attribute facts that belie our worldview to chicanery, and the more likely we are to become emotional rather than analytical in response to statements that contradict our ideas. Byt this theory, extremists will become angry, per frankenduf, release anger, and thus avoid unpleasant cognitive dissonance by avoiding considering inconvenient truths.

– Posted by misterb
33. May 16th,
2008
7:04 am

This analysis misses one significant point.

Combined with those in the “moderate” camps, left and right, are those who can’t bother to have strong political opinions. Among these are those who are depressed, clinically or otherwise.

This subset of depressed people can completely skew the numbers when it comes to associating happiness with political fervor.

– Posted by Greta
36. May 18th,
2008
11:47 am

2 comments:
#1: Depressed people tend to have a more accurate self-assessment of their abilities and performance. (I really hate to say “studies show…”, but they do. It’s a simply psychological experiment: give people a task to do, then ask them to rate their own performance.)
It’s certainly been my experience as well….

#2: Well, duh! The message of the study is not that conservatives are happier, it is that IN THE USA, conservatives are happier. It’s an easy bet that in a liberal society, the happiness distribution would be reversed. Anyway you cut it, compared to other nations, the US is politically & religiously conservative society.

So, yeah, you analyze the data controlling for income, education, race, religion, etc, so that you can conclude that conservatives are happier folks, but the results are only valid in the USA!

– Posted by Dennis

 

 

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2 days later

Nicole said

interesting… i think there is some amount of truth in each comment… so who can say really what it all means?

 

 

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2 days later

Marmalade said

Yes, interesting… but what to make of it?!  I find research about this very intriguing, but I don’t have the capacity to really understand it.  Statistics are so easily interpreted with one’s bias.  Seligman interprets it one way but there is no objective reason for him to interpret it that way.  He gives it an optimistic slant and he is probably the happier for it whether or not he is correct.  🙂

 

 

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3 days later

Nicole said

i have similar reservations to you about this whole optimism thing…

and yes, like archaeology where “rocks are plastic” or in other words, diggings can “reveal” many things depending on the assumptions of the scientist or interpreter, statistics can mean pretty much anything. So, IMO are often meaningless