[*****]
Margaret Mead's Male and Female is a masterpiece of anthropological writing, focusing on how different cultures approach gender, deal with naturally occurring biological differences in gender, and manufacture there own gender differences to go on top of the naturally occurring ones. This is already reason enough to take note of the book as something worth reading. Mead explains how most of what we think of as gender is a social construct (and proves it by giving examples of societies that treat it differently) without resorting to the normal post-modern failure mode of treating legitimately real things as though they were socially constructed. Gender does have a very strong biological basis which puts quite a few constraints on what additional constructs a society will manufacture on top of purely biological differences. Mead does a remarkable job of acknowledging the existence of both factors, keeping the two concepts isolated from each other, and talking about how they are related.
Male and Female is from 1949, so Mead is able to start with relatively simple definitions of gender. Females are people with the organs and glands required to gestate and nurse children, and males are people who lack the biological hardware for doing these things regardless of how functional their other relevant body parts are. Most of her descriptions of gender indicate that she would classify hermaphrodites as more-female-than-male for the purposes of her discussion, and classify transgender and transsexual people by their cis-gender for the purposes of her discussion. She does talk quite a bit about cultures which had a tradition of people taking up the opposite gender role as their cis-gender, and she doesn't treat a culture's inclusion of this culture as a deviance, though she does discuss the decision of people who behave in a manner that is not approved for their gender in a culture that does not tolerate that departure from gender roles as engaging in deviant behavior. Because she had lived among peoples who accepted some amount of transsexualism within their culture and studied cultures with these kinds of practices, she avoided discussing transsexualism in a way that insinuated that it was inherently offensive to nature or particularly deviant, even though she did discuss it in a way that suggested that it was incompatible with Western sensibilities (with which she did not appear to sympathize particularly strongly). In contrast, Mead does not appear to have lived among or extensively studied any group that was very accepting of homosexuality. The contrast of the book's willingness to accept transsexual practices with its treatment of homosexuality as something inherently degenerate is the only thing that really dates this book. Practically everything Mead discusses was informed, enlightened, and progressive by the standards of 1949. Most of it is still all of those things by today's standards, but a handful of comments mostly about preventing homosexuality will be off-putting to many modern readers, and odd-to-say-the-least to most others. (She doesn't say anything particularly negative about homosexualite. She simply writes with the assumption that her reader's will believe that it is something to be prevented whenever preventing it is possible.)
If I can't find anything worse to say about a book than that a few of the moral sensibilities with which it has written have since gone out of fashion, I'm going to call that book an excellent book. I'd prefer a book that somehow managed to steer clear of saying anything that reflected the moral sensibilities of the author, but on a topic as intensely steeped in moralistic discussion as gender and sex, the fact that most of the book could survive the past 66 years without seeming grossly obsolete on the basis of moralistic considerations alone is itself remarkable. It is all the more remarkable when you consider that most of the things she says would have likewise avoided being morally scandalous 66 years ago. Given how completely ideas about sexuality and gender have changed in the last half century threading the needle through the subject carefully enough to only have one or two snags is in itself worthy of commendation.
Mead divides her book into two parts, but the first three are similar to each other and the fourth is quite different, so I'll write about her book as if she had divided it into two parts (I-III as the first, and IV as the second). The first part describes eight cultures in which she has lived and which she has studied. They range from hunter-gatherer to third world semi-industrialized. She subdivides her discussion of these cultures into a topics, and talks about each culture when it suits the subject she has picked to discuss rather than giving a culture-by-culture account of each group of people. All of this was fascinating and informative. I occasionally wondered while I was reading it how much cherry-picking she was doing to support her points and how much of what she said was actually true. When I reached her discussion of American culture in the second part, I became pretty convinced she had a brutal devotion to accuracy that she would not compromise to suit her agenda.
Her account of modern American culture is breathtaking. It is the only description of a culture I understand that I have read that I think could have been plausibly written by an intelligent non-human observer. She makes no attempts to sympathize or even much of an attempt to understand. Simply to see and describe. She makes endlessly many observations that you and I ordinarily refuse to think. She describes a culture haphazardly strung together in such a way that keeps both males and females trapped in a double bind related to their gender roles setting members of both genders up for repeated failures in their pursuit of a meaningful life within the confines of the identity that their society hands them when they are children, forcing girls to choose between renouncing their dreams (and related parts of their identity) or unsexing themselves and psychologically emasculating boys, especially young boys.
I can't do the book justice in my attempts to describe it. If you can find a copy and read the part entitled "The Two Sexes in Contemporary American Culture," I'd strongly recommend doing so. I recommend the whole book, but if you only have time for a third of it, that section is good enough that I would almost consider it indespensible reading.
I'm updating this post a couple years after writing it originally. After writing it, I've seen criticism of this book that claim that Mead claims that the pain of childbirth is mostly socially constructed. I don't remember her saying that. I remember her saying that the amount of pain women in a particular culture say they experience during childbirth is strongly correlated with the amount of pain that men in their culture expect them to feel, and talking about socially-constructed sympathetic pain that men say they feel when their wife is in labor with their child in at least one culture. However, she also describes many reasons that one culture would have completely different ideas of pain from another, and does talk about ways that environment and culture shape the perception of pain in general. For instance, a culture where a coming of age ritual is stuffing nettles into a girl when she has her first period is going to have a very different relationship with the concept of pain than most other cultures do. I've read a lot of anthropological commentaries before I read this book, and it was the first one that I've read that talked about the existence of excruciating coming of age rituals for girls becoming women in some tribal cultures. Mead doesn't deny the existence of physical realities, but she does talk about the way that different societies approach the subject of pain and the subject of gender and how these things relate to how people perceive the physical realities of their bodies.
Saturday, May 2, 2015
Ariely's The Upside of Irrationality
[***]
The Upside of Irrationality is a letdown after Ariely' Predictably Irrational. The experiments he describes tend to be pretty interesting, but I frequently don't buy the just-so stories he extracts from the descriptions, and I often get the sense that Ariely doesn't really understand the subjects he is talking about enough to make the sorts of comments he makes.
He studies the effect of large incentives on people's performance. I completely believe all of the results he has reported, but I think Ariely displays a complete lack of understanding of the subjects he applies them to, when he tries to explain the real-world relevance of his findings. He talks about basketball and bonuses as the application of his results. Ariely admits to not understanding basketball and then goes on to discredit the idea that clutch players exist in basketball. He found that the players who are known as "really clutch players" don't shoot any better under pressure, they just don't shoot any worse. Oh, and they also take more shots, if that matters at all. First of all, there's the matter of semantics. If most players break down under pressure, and a few play just as well under pressure as the rest of the time. The players who don't break down are clutch players. That's pretty much exactly what the phrase means. When it matters most, some players figure out how to win games consistently where others can't figure out how to do it. Since sports are entirely about your relative performs remaining exactly as good as your normal self in situations that cause practically everybody else to get worse is performing really well. The second thing is, keeping your normal accuracy while taking more shots and shooting sooner after you touch the ball is actually playing better basketball. Teams frequently use up most of the shot clock looking for an open shot. If you're able to make shots about as well when you are trying to shoot in the first ten seconds of the shot clock as you are when you are willing to use up the whole clock, you are playing better basketball than normal because your taking more heavily contested shots and still getting the same results. It's a lot harder to make the easiest shot you can find in ten seconds of searching for an open shot than it is to take the easiest shot you can find in twenty-four seconds of searching for an open shot.
But Ariely didn't really care about basketball. He was disputing the idea of clutch players existing in basketball, not because he had anything to say about basketball (he freely admitted that he knew next to nothing about the game), but because he was trying to demonstrate that nobody performs better when stakes are sufficiently elevated than they do under more ordinary circumstances. The main point he was trying to make was "Wall Street bonuses are egregious, and they aren't just egregious, they hurt the companies that pay them out because nobody performs better when the stakes are enormous than they do for smaller stakes." Okay, and here's where Ariely demonstrates that he really doesn't understand economics... or experiences that are more complicated than the ones that people might encounter in a lab. First of all the difference between real life experiences and lab experiments. Effort impacts your ability to improve over time a lot more than it does your ability to perform in the moment. Ariely designed experiments that are capable of measuring the impact of choking without having any ability to measure the impact of practicing more or putting in extra hours. In real life, extra hours can add a lot. And people are motivated by heavy stakes to put in a lot more effort and a lot more hours than they would be by lower rewards. If you tell your students that you've revised your grading policy, and the midterm exam that you've just handed out is now worth 100% of their grade instead of the 10% that they'd previously thought, a lot of them are going to choke and nobody's going to suddenly remember everything they didn't study because of the new incentive. But if you tell them the same thing the week before, you're going to have an awful lot of students who wouldn't have studied that much for an exam that was just worth 10% of their grade showing up having studied for this exam like they hadn't studied for any test in a long time. The real world is a place where, if you have advanced warning that something counts extra, you can put in a lot of extra effort to make sure that you're prepared and you've done everything possible to get the best possible results. The more damning critique of Ariely's comments is that it demonstrates a startling lack of understanding of how economics work. Wall Street companies don't pay huge bonuses because they think that paying people huge bonuses will motivate them to get better results. They pay key employees huge bonuses because they want to motivate those employees to stay with the company and keep producing the results they're already producing for them... instead of going to a competitor and producing those results for a competitor instead. You see, there's this thing called a job market, and a job market is a market. A market is a place where people come to exchange goods and services, and... *face palm*
Oh — kay.
Ariely goes on to talk about the joy of work, the IKEA effect, and the "not invented here" syndrome. He separates these into three separate chapters, but they are at least as closely related to each other as the topics he meanders through in most of his individual chapters. His discussion of the joy of work and the IKEA effect is pretty good, though it still seems rather simplistic. For instance, people attach extra value not just to things they've personally made but also to things that their friends and relatives have personally made or even personally possessed. As well as things that people they admire but have never met have personally made or personally possessed. I would guess that these things are somehow related, and the underlying phenomenon is about something a little bit different from the attachment to one's own labor that is part of Ariely's just so story. (And Ariely's just so story is suspiciously compatible with one particular ideological movement that talks a lot about the alienation of man from man's own labor. I am somewhat sympathetic to this ideology, much more so than the average American. Even so, when someone's findings map this well onto an ideology, I have to suspect that there's quite a bit of motivated cognition at play.)
Then there's "not invented here" syndrome. Like most people who describe it, Ariely fails to convincingly establish that NIHS is a real thing. Clayton Christensen has put forth a very convincing theory of how markets work that explain away the phenomena which NIHS was invented to explain. Christensen's theory does an excellent job of explaining a host of other market phenomena in the process without deteriorating into a host of ad hoc explanations or requiring the postulation of man's sinful nature to describe why things fail. Giving the choice between an explanation that describes the workings of impersonal market forces and one that asserts that people almost have a categorical tendency to some particular sin (or "bias" to use Ariely's preferred term for sin), I'm always going to opt for the explanation that has to do with impersonal market forces.
Ariely deals with plenty of other subject in The Upside of Irrationality, but that's all I have the patience to describe tonight.
The Upside of Irrationality is a letdown after Ariely' Predictably Irrational. The experiments he describes tend to be pretty interesting, but I frequently don't buy the just-so stories he extracts from the descriptions, and I often get the sense that Ariely doesn't really understand the subjects he is talking about enough to make the sorts of comments he makes.
He studies the effect of large incentives on people's performance. I completely believe all of the results he has reported, but I think Ariely displays a complete lack of understanding of the subjects he applies them to, when he tries to explain the real-world relevance of his findings. He talks about basketball and bonuses as the application of his results. Ariely admits to not understanding basketball and then goes on to discredit the idea that clutch players exist in basketball. He found that the players who are known as "really clutch players" don't shoot any better under pressure, they just don't shoot any worse. Oh, and they also take more shots, if that matters at all. First of all, there's the matter of semantics. If most players break down under pressure, and a few play just as well under pressure as the rest of the time. The players who don't break down are clutch players. That's pretty much exactly what the phrase means. When it matters most, some players figure out how to win games consistently where others can't figure out how to do it. Since sports are entirely about your relative performs remaining exactly as good as your normal self in situations that cause practically everybody else to get worse is performing really well. The second thing is, keeping your normal accuracy while taking more shots and shooting sooner after you touch the ball is actually playing better basketball. Teams frequently use up most of the shot clock looking for an open shot. If you're able to make shots about as well when you are trying to shoot in the first ten seconds of the shot clock as you are when you are willing to use up the whole clock, you are playing better basketball than normal because your taking more heavily contested shots and still getting the same results. It's a lot harder to make the easiest shot you can find in ten seconds of searching for an open shot than it is to take the easiest shot you can find in twenty-four seconds of searching for an open shot.
But Ariely didn't really care about basketball. He was disputing the idea of clutch players existing in basketball, not because he had anything to say about basketball (he freely admitted that he knew next to nothing about the game), but because he was trying to demonstrate that nobody performs better when stakes are sufficiently elevated than they do under more ordinary circumstances. The main point he was trying to make was "Wall Street bonuses are egregious, and they aren't just egregious, they hurt the companies that pay them out because nobody performs better when the stakes are enormous than they do for smaller stakes." Okay, and here's where Ariely demonstrates that he really doesn't understand economics... or experiences that are more complicated than the ones that people might encounter in a lab. First of all the difference between real life experiences and lab experiments. Effort impacts your ability to improve over time a lot more than it does your ability to perform in the moment. Ariely designed experiments that are capable of measuring the impact of choking without having any ability to measure the impact of practicing more or putting in extra hours. In real life, extra hours can add a lot. And people are motivated by heavy stakes to put in a lot more effort and a lot more hours than they would be by lower rewards. If you tell your students that you've revised your grading policy, and the midterm exam that you've just handed out is now worth 100% of their grade instead of the 10% that they'd previously thought, a lot of them are going to choke and nobody's going to suddenly remember everything they didn't study because of the new incentive. But if you tell them the same thing the week before, you're going to have an awful lot of students who wouldn't have studied that much for an exam that was just worth 10% of their grade showing up having studied for this exam like they hadn't studied for any test in a long time. The real world is a place where, if you have advanced warning that something counts extra, you can put in a lot of extra effort to make sure that you're prepared and you've done everything possible to get the best possible results. The more damning critique of Ariely's comments is that it demonstrates a startling lack of understanding of how economics work. Wall Street companies don't pay huge bonuses because they think that paying people huge bonuses will motivate them to get better results. They pay key employees huge bonuses because they want to motivate those employees to stay with the company and keep producing the results they're already producing for them... instead of going to a competitor and producing those results for a competitor instead. You see, there's this thing called a job market, and a job market is a market. A market is a place where people come to exchange goods and services, and... *face palm*
Oh — kay.
Ariely goes on to talk about the joy of work, the IKEA effect, and the "not invented here" syndrome. He separates these into three separate chapters, but they are at least as closely related to each other as the topics he meanders through in most of his individual chapters. His discussion of the joy of work and the IKEA effect is pretty good, though it still seems rather simplistic. For instance, people attach extra value not just to things they've personally made but also to things that their friends and relatives have personally made or even personally possessed. As well as things that people they admire but have never met have personally made or personally possessed. I would guess that these things are somehow related, and the underlying phenomenon is about something a little bit different from the attachment to one's own labor that is part of Ariely's just so story. (And Ariely's just so story is suspiciously compatible with one particular ideological movement that talks a lot about the alienation of man from man's own labor. I am somewhat sympathetic to this ideology, much more so than the average American. Even so, when someone's findings map this well onto an ideology, I have to suspect that there's quite a bit of motivated cognition at play.)
Then there's "not invented here" syndrome. Like most people who describe it, Ariely fails to convincingly establish that NIHS is a real thing. Clayton Christensen has put forth a very convincing theory of how markets work that explain away the phenomena which NIHS was invented to explain. Christensen's theory does an excellent job of explaining a host of other market phenomena in the process without deteriorating into a host of ad hoc explanations or requiring the postulation of man's sinful nature to describe why things fail. Giving the choice between an explanation that describes the workings of impersonal market forces and one that asserts that people almost have a categorical tendency to some particular sin (or "bias" to use Ariely's preferred term for sin), I'm always going to opt for the explanation that has to do with impersonal market forces.
Ariely deals with plenty of other subject in The Upside of Irrationality, but that's all I have the patience to describe tonight.
Burg & Mann The Go-Giver
[**]
The Go-Giver is a lot better than most morality fables and self-help novels. The advice is mostly trite oversimplifications, the story is nauseatingly contrived, and most of the empirical claims in the book are false. However, none of these were quite as bad as I expected based on other books I've previously read in the genre. More importantly, all of the specific examples the book gives are good examples. If you treat all of the in abstract discussion as what people who don't really understand abstract reasoning but do understand signaling would say to hint in the general direction of what they actually mean, most of the problems with the book go away. The particular ways that Joe, the main character, applies the "secrets" he learns are all consistent with the behavior someone would take if they did understand how the iterated prisoner dilemma is supposed to work. If you understand game theory, you understand both why this book is kinda-sorta right and also why this book is entirely wrong.
Also hyperbole upon hyperbole... until all of the universe is consumed in nothing but platitudes! Such hyperbole, like you can't even imagine unless you've read any other books in this genre which somehow manage to be even worse (despite the impossibility).
This book is about the secrets of "stratospheric success." It basically reduces to be a nice person, impact a lot of people, and create more value than you retain. Oh, but do retain some of the value you create! This is all good advice, once you subtract out the hyperbole... and add in the other three rules of the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Punish defectors. Punish defectors. Punish defectors! (I've empirically tested what happens when you drop that rule from your strategy, and the results are double plus ungood to say the least. "Always defect" is a slightly better strategy than "always cooperate" both in theory and in practice.) That's one of the problems I have with morality tales.
The rules morality tales give are almost always great rules for walled gardens, as long as you guard your walled garden. But these sorts of books always poo-poo the need to do that. You need to do that. Otherwise you get Fruitlands.
But then there is that whole phrase "stratospheric success."
This book isn't about stratospheric success, and doing what it recommends won't bring you stratospheric success, even if you do it in the right way. Which is different from the way that the book recommends.
The following is a seven step plan for stratospheric success:
- Be born brilliant.
- Start learning the skills you will eventually need long before you need them and long before a bunch of other people have started to learn the same exact skills.
- Work really damn hard to revise those skills.
- Meet the right people and make the write connection.
- Be at the right place at the right time.
- Seize the opportunities you have when you have them.
- Work really damn hard to make sure that your attempt to seize those
Sometimes, if you get very, very lucky you can skip one or even two of these seven steps, but most extremely successful people do all of them.
Margulis Symbiotic Planet
[**]
Lynn Margulis' Symbiotic Planet was probably worth reading. It's not nearly as good as Microcosmos, which I would recommend to anyone looking for a good book on biology, especially anyone interested in reading Margulis. On the other hand, if you don't really want to read a book on biology, but you want to read a book by a prominent biologist, Symbiotic Planet might be a good choice. It's very short and easy to read. A lot of it isn't really about biology per se. It deals significantly with history of science and autobiography.
My main criticism of Symbiotic Planet is that it's too scattered and too brief to make much of a point. You pick up a little bit of biology that you might not have known (but probably did if you were someone who was inclined to read it to begin with). You read very brief descriptions of a few interesting experiments or a few interesting results that those experiments found. You learn quite a bit about how Margulis approached biology, which is arguably useful, given her influence on the field. She believed that the perspective of a student of the humanities is underrated in science. She might be right. She believed that when scientists dismiss material outside of their area of focus as unimportant before they bother to learn more about it, they're displaying hubris not the ability to prudently select priorities. Her career demonstrates that she was right about this.
Lynn Margulis' Symbiotic Planet was probably worth reading. It's not nearly as good as Microcosmos, which I would recommend to anyone looking for a good book on biology, especially anyone interested in reading Margulis. On the other hand, if you don't really want to read a book on biology, but you want to read a book by a prominent biologist, Symbiotic Planet might be a good choice. It's very short and easy to read. A lot of it isn't really about biology per se. It deals significantly with history of science and autobiography.
My main criticism of Symbiotic Planet is that it's too scattered and too brief to make much of a point. You pick up a little bit of biology that you might not have known (but probably did if you were someone who was inclined to read it to begin with). You read very brief descriptions of a few interesting experiments or a few interesting results that those experiments found. You learn quite a bit about how Margulis approached biology, which is arguably useful, given her influence on the field. She believed that the perspective of a student of the humanities is underrated in science. She might be right. She believed that when scientists dismiss material outside of their area of focus as unimportant before they bother to learn more about it, they're displaying hubris not the ability to prudently select priorities. Her career demonstrates that she was right about this.
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