As I type this, it’s currently 35 degrees, at 9am on an October morning in Brisbane. And, while one day’s temperatures don’t prove anything, a string of studies have shown that the increasingly frequent heatwaves in Australia can be reliably attributed to global warming. We haven’t had an El Nino yet, but according to NOAA, the last 12 months have been the hottest such period on record.
It will be interesting to see what the denialists come up with in response to this combination of record breaking local and global warming. We can safely rule out anything along the lines of “as a sceptic, I like to wait for convincing evidence before accepting a new hypothesis. But, with the steady accumulation of evidence I’m now convinced”. I suspect we’ll get more along the lines of
* Graham Lloyd, reporting a new study by Jennifer Marohasy, showing that the communists at the Met Bureau are artificially pumping hot air through Australian cities to cover up the fact that they rigged the data to show exactly this warming
* The Telegraph, with a front-page story of an old codger saying something like “You think this is hot? Back in ’23, we had heat waves in July so bad that concrete footpaths melted”
* Andrew Bolt will readjust the start dates so he can continue to claim “no significant warming for the past x years”, omitting the crucial word “statistically”
John Quiggin 
They got to 0.06 degrees by working out the regular straight line that goes through the middle of the graph, and seeing what the regular increase was over the century.
I haven’t done maths since high school, so I think there is probably a mathsy way of doing it properly that I can’t tell you how it was done. Professor Quiggin could likely explain it but it is unlikely he has the time – if you wanted to know you would probably need to read a book on statistics and read articles on statistical analysis of warming from 1914-2014.
Or you could be like me in this temperature issue and think some people have already spent time working this out, and concentrate on something else.
But since this is the issue you are concerned about you could look into it. If I am concerned about a report misrepresenting something like the recent Pathways to Deep Decarbonisation report that exceeds 2 degrees of warming if you read it all, then I look into it as best as I can. So I encourage you to do the same if this is your particular area of concern (although I think it looks fairly solid myself).
For your second point on how can we go from around 0.8 degrees-plus-what’s-already-in-the-pipeline, I will have to look at the book again for details, as I can’t remember off the top of my head.
I presume it is because our warming now is from the cumulative ghg emissions up until the 1970s/1980s – but since then as you will gave noticed from reading the news, more countries have industrialised, and in countries like Australia people’s consumption gas gone up. So the temperature rise would be at a greater rate. If you made up a model of this, you might say over the next one hundred years more countries would continue to industrialise and consumption would continue to increase at rate X : therefore ghg emissions increase related to X : and assuming there is nit a Great War or other catastrophe then by 2114 ghg in the atmosphere will be around Y which would take temperature rises to 4-6 degrees higher than pre-industrial temperatures.
I assume that would be the sort of thing you do to get a figure for business as usual temperature rises forecasting to 2114.
I am a bit busy now, but I’ll look at the book later on and see how it is explained properly.
@Val
Val, and to a lesser degree Julie Thomas , always walk on the sunny side of the street. The very idea of “motivated cognition” is a perfect exemplar of the profound misreading to which Darwinism has been put. Cats do “motivated cognition”, along with other lab animals, but properly human, human animals, those of us capable of rational thought beyond the next generation, don’t.
If it looks like it conforms to the behavioral rules of “cognitive motivation”, shoot it, coz it ain’t human.
@jungney
Thanks for that awesome bit of wisdom and some more insights into the way your ‘motivated’ cognition works and the sort of rationalisation you use to continue to see yourself as an awesome dude who knows stuff that other people do not know.
Where do you get your understanding of what underpins human behaviour? Can you give me some idea of where I may have gone wrong in my understanding of this area of research?
Can I evah be as insightful and common-sense full as you? If not, why not? What is it about you that means you can see that motivated cognition is not human and me and Dan Kahan cannot see this?
@jungney
Are you trying to pick a fight? Because if so, boring, I’ve got better things to do.
@chrisl
No, it is unlikely to have flat-lined. Weren’t you paying attention (above) when I pointed out:
“There is no statistically significant slowdown at the top of that graph.”
This means we can’t reject the null hypothesis that warming net of noise is continuing at the long term rate of 0.17 degrees C/decade.
18 years (1996-2014) of GISTEMP data gives a 2-sigma confidence interval of 0.107±0.110 degrees C/decade which means a 97.4% likelihood of warming. This is not “flat”.
chrisl,
I hope you will still be reading, because I have to correct some numbers that I mixed up.
At the moment we are at around 400 ppm – relating this to temperature we are now at 0.8-degrees-of-warming-plus-lagging-warming-already-in-the-piipeline.
The governments did agree to keep within 2 degrees of warming. But I was wrong about the amount of ppm co2e to stay within 2 degrees – the would be 450ppm co2e.
The pre-industrial level was around 280ppm co2e – so we have emitted enough ghg already to go up by 120ppm to 400ppm co2e already. And now we can only emit ghg to go up by 50ppm to 450ppm co2e.
As you can see this is not very much compared to the 120ppm rise since 1750.
Sorry about the mix up.
post-script – stabilising at 450ppm co2e would only give a 50% chance of limiting average global warming to 2 degrees. 50% is not very good odds for such an important thing as stabilising the climate.
@chrisl
If it really is just measurement you’re worried about then 0.6 degrees (over a century) is not that difficult.
Doesn’t sound like you’re done too much experimental physics.
chrisl,
Your Q: How can we go from 0.08 degrees of warming to 4-6 degrees of warming in just the next century?
A.
We saw in my last comment that to have a 50% chance of staying within 2 degrees we need to stay at less than 450ppm co2e.
To do this the Copenhagen Diagnosis showed that global emissions would probably need to peak in the next 5 years (2015-2020), and from then decline steeply.
So that means to stay within 2 degrees the countries including need a great change from the current way of doing things and the present trajectory of rising global emissions.
If countries fulfil their current pledges about decreasing their ghg emissions ‘global total ghg emissions in 2020 are likely to be between 53 and 55 billion tonnes CO2e per year’. This is higher than they need to be if we are to stay within 2 degrees – the gap is around 14 billion tonnes (about the same as the current ghg emissions of USA and China put together).
Global CO2 emissions rose 1.9%p.a. in the 1980s on average; 1%p.a. in the 1990s; 3.1%p.a. in the 2000s.
The book says “These growth rates are at the high end of the emissions scenarios used by the IPCC. They would lead to a global-average warming of 4.2-5.0 degrees C by the year 2100 (Peters et al 2012).”
The Hadley Centre and the British Met Office said : “…the AR4 [IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report] projections clearly suggest that much greater ranges of warming are possible by the end of the 21st Century in the absence of mitigation. The centre of the range of AR4 projected global warming was approximately 4 degrees C…” “our best estimate is that the A1FI [IPCC high emissions scenario] emissions scenario would lead to a warming of 4 degrees C relative to pre-industrial times during the 2070s. If carbon feedback cycles are stronger, which appears less likely but still credible, then 4 degrees C warming could be reached by 2060.”
A report written for the World Bank (Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4C Warmer World Must Be Avoided) said even if countries implement their current pledges there still is a 20% likelihood of exceeding 4 degrees C by 2100. In the high emissions scenario “Warming would not stop there. Because of the slow response of the climate system, the greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations that would lead to warming of 4 degrees C by 2100 would actually commit the world to a much higher warming, exceeding 6 degrees C or more, in the longer term, with several metres of sea-level rise ultimately associated with this warming.”
From : Four Degrees of Global Warming : Australia in a Hot World : Introduction, by Peter Christoff
@Chris O’Neill
Actually, that was for a bit over 18 years. It’s whatever http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php gives you for 1996 to the present.
@jungney
On the other hand Jungney, what is it that you’re saying because I don’t really understand it. It sounded as if you were insulting Julie and me, but maybe you weren’t? Could you clarify.
There are various articles feeling available on 4 degrees of warming, but they are quite complex .
“When could global warming reach 4°C?” is one from the Royal Society with lots of graphs if you like graphs
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/67.full.html
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) assessed a range of scenarios of future greenhouse-gas emissions without policies to specifically reduce emissions, and concluded that these would lead to an increase in global mean temperatures of between 1.6°C and 6.9°C by the end of the twenty-first century, relative to pre-industrial. ”
“The evidence available from new simulations with the HadCM3 GCM and the MAGICC SCM, along with existing results presented in the IPCC AR4, suggests that the A1FI emissions scenario would lead to a rise in global mean temperature of between approximately 3°C and 7°C by the 2090s relative to pre-industrial, with best estimates being around 5°C. Our best estimate is that a temperature rise of 4°C would be reached in the 2070s, and if carbon-cycle feedbacks are strong, then 4°C could be reached in the early 2060s—this latter projection appears to be consistent with the upper end of the IPCC’s likely range of warming for the A1FI scenario.”
@jungney
Motivated cognition. Doesn’t that just mean that you believe what you want to believe? And we do, often not changing our beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Or am I understanding motivated cognition wrongly?
@John Brookes
Yes, motivated cognition is simply a way of explaining why and how we believe what we want to believe.
But if you read Dan Kahan, there is a lot more to it than that for those who are interested in understanding human nature through a systematic, experimental approach.
The ‘best’ book on the evo psych idea that our brains and our ways of thinking are ‘programmed’ to function using ‘rules’ that were functional and actually provided humans with the cognitive advantages that allowed us to dominate the planet, is by Rob Kurzban, “Why Everybody (else) is a Hypocrite”.
ZM Thanks for your replies, You have gone to a lot of trouble
@Val
No, not intended as an insult at all. I long ago gave up wondering at the maladjusted logic behind all sorts of human barbarism so these days, when I do encounter the twenty dollar notion of motivated reasoning or cognitive bias or whatever other name you want to apply to it, my first reaction is to wonder ‘how do we defeat numpties like this?’ or, better yet, ‘how can we address education funding so as to starve the nitwit producing private schools into submission?’
In general, I don’t think that experimental psychology has as much to teach about our current general condition than older analyses offered by class and the notion of self interest.
@jungney
Thanks for clarification, I agree with you in a general sense, but am fairly inclusive about theory in a general sense – I don’t think we need to choose between psychological and sociopolitical theories – need to look at context. For myself, I can consider that I am a white middle class left wing feminist, so I’m probably going to interpret things from that context. so I have to be reflective on that eg be mindful of exaggerating evidence about how bad T Abbott is (though you might say that’s hard to do!) or not necessarily assume that you’re trying to patronise me, though it’s true that men in discussions often do!
In a broad sense I do agree though that socio-political explanations are more important. Indeed I’m now trying to frame my work through ecofeminist perspectives, which can be challenging. We are so accustomed to seeing human beings as the centre of the universe.
@Val
I don’t have any fundamental disagreement with ecofeminism, in fact, quite the reverse, although I’d guess that the field is now so crowded and contested that finding a clear path would be a challenge for you. Nothing quite like acres of article to read and cross reference 🙂
@jungney
It would be a good idea to update your understanding of what is happening in modern psychology before you dismiss it with silly sayings like it’s a twenty dollar whatever. I think you are being a numpty or even a douche canoe 🙂 for saying this .
Can you see that because you ‘like’ the old class warfare explanations; they satisfy your need for a coherent coherent conceptualisation of the world. You want to hold on to that certainty and so you are motivated to dismiss all this new fangled psychological information for many reasons that I would not even try to guess at.
But the reasons – the things that motivate you to be biased against a psychological explanation – will be there and if you are clever you will be able to notice the automatic cognitive response that happens to you when you read this.
These new ideas from psychology, anthropology and the other disciplines that seek to understand human nature do not necessarily negate the old class analysis; they are an addition to the progressive program and can help us all think more rationally about our “current general condition” and allow us to change it this time without violent revolution.
It is motivated thinking that underpins all the dysfunctional thinking about class and the stupid argument that libertarians make about self-interest being a good thing.
I think that class analyses and psychological theories of motivated cognition are perfectly compatible. Being of a certain upbringing, life experience and personality type I oppose capitalism. My upbringing and life experience are basically class determined.* Clearly, I too can be a “victim” of motivated cognition as I can cherrypick facts and develop self-proving theories to post-hoc justify my dislike and rejection of capitalism. I can even be inconsistent, hypocritical and non-activist, enjoying certain fruits of the system as I criticise it from a safe armchair or computer chair.
I don’t think Val and Julie were necessarily saying that motivated cognition has much to teach us about our general class condition. I think they were more saying that motivated cognition provides post-hoc justification at the personal level and development of the ideological superstructure to validate and entrench the material basis of (currently capitalist) society at the social level.
* Note on class: IMO opinion the bulk of the so-called middle class are still really part of the working class. If the majority of your income in the working portion of your life comes from non-professional or semi-professional personal effort then you are a worker. It makes no difference if you are a white collar or blue collar worker.
Full professionals, some self-employed and some self-funded retirees might be a bit different but at most we could term them part of the petite bourgeoisie unless they make a substantial transition to being fully-fledged capitalists and/or rentiers. Being petite bourgeoisie economically will not necessarily equate to having petite bourgeoisie attitudes and sympathies.
@Julie Thomas
Julie: I’m familiar enough with psychology to know some of its branches, within which experimental psychology is well represented in the US and here, really constitute an arm of the military/industrial complex. Psychology has a politics my introduction to which was via Stephen Jay Gould’s devastating critique of IQ, the ‘Mismeasure of Man’, which also details the way in which the US armed services quickly adapted to both IQ and the general practice of quantifying humans. This extended into the industrialized quantification of factory workforces; psychology was a handmaiden at the birth of this new discipline, in the form of ‘time and motion studies’ and thereafter a thousand other misreadings of humans which became ways in which to deskill the workforce while simultaneously making it bend the knee to authority. The whole field of militarily derived ‘work improvements’ is, I suspect, one of the institutional and intellectual spawning grounds of Human Relations and, as mentioned elsewhere, kpi’s.
What I’m saying here is that psychology is no less a form of technology than any other. It therefore is the bearer of all sorts of power relations which are themselves embedded with the practices of the discipline. Experimental psychology, which is always profoundly reductionist when conducted on humans, embodies the worst sort of intellectual, cold war ideology not least because so many of its northern hemisphere personnel went through a revolving door between the state (the academy, the government) and the military.
I am, however, able to know a genuine humanist when I see one and regularly check on the work of Bessel van der Kolk whose path breaking study of the neurobiology of trauma has recently advocated yoga as a management strategy. I understand that people’s lived experiences alter neurobiological functioning in terms of both pathways and chemistry. van der Kolk has imaged and mapped this process, and explains how it manifests in human behaviour. The problem I have with drab experimental psychology, especially behaviouralism, is that it only offers a psychology of conformism; it doesn’t in any way reflect the actual reality of lived human experience.
I am aware of elements and tendencies within current psychology or at least sufficiently so to be able to identify a strand via the archeology of knowledge.
I don’t want to attribute all human history to the psycho-biological consequences of trauma but I do think that the area of the mass transmission of inter-generational trauma offers insights into history and current times not previously available to study. The State of Israel, for example, cannot be understood without the understanding that a state of traumatized people becomes, at its worst, a traumatizing state.
Now, that’s a human psychology derived from two disciplines apparently unknown to behavioural psychology: real science and history.
@jungney
Fascinating stuff.
Now I see that the problem all came from my use of the word ‘experimental’ and your jumping to the conclusion – no problem that is my favourite exercise also – that I meant ‘experimental psychology’ and you just went from there to tell me how awesome your knowledge is and how dodgy mine was.
You could have been so much more logical clarified what I meant by “experimental”; you could even have read the sentence again to see if my useage accorded with your immediate and emotional assumptions of what I meant.
You could also have actually looked up what Dan Kahan’s Motivated Cognition is all about before you patronised me – less so than Val I did notice that – by giving us the benefit of your knowledge because of course without a doubt what you know about psychology has to be all there is to know.
I found that a bit annoying since I spend a lot of time online reading blogs from the leading researchers in evo psych and other new fangled areas of psych that you may not be familiar with. Is that possible do you think?
Very impressed I am by your support for the bits of psychology that you do like, but still disappointed – mildly so don’t you worry bout it – by your threadbare and illogical objections to my comments on Motivated Cogntion.
Behavioural psychology!!!??? What century are you living in? I can’t even begin to think why you imagine that this would be something worth commenting on with respect to modern psychology.
@Julie Thomas
Even worse than using IQ to quantify humans is the use that IQ was and is put to to denigrate women’s intelligence and show us to be less ‘everything’ than men.
Psychologists early last century actually proved that a woman’s brain was made of “less substantial’ stuff than male brains.
And some of the current male evo psychs – or more accurately devotees of evo psych – are nearly as bad in terms of being eugenicists as the early sexist racist wealthy white men, but this does not mean that the experimental and systematic attempt to understand human nature is doomed or useless.
ooops talking to myself again. That was meant for
@jungney
@jungney
I don’t want to enter into the details of this controversy. As a general principle, any valid and useful tool or method (a hammer or a science or a branch of science) can be used or misused. Behavioural psychology, if a valid field of enquiry (and I don’t want to enter into that controversy) could be used or misused. The fact of misuse (in at least some quarters) is not in and of itself a strike against validity.
chrisl,
No worries. I hope it was helpful.
Well, I guess I’m a trans kinda person having been born roughly half way through last century.
I did look up you’re reference to the type of reasoning you mentioned, ‘motivated cognition’, with some scepticism as to the nature of the issue along the lines of “well, what other sort of cognition is there?” I read nothing there, or elsewhere on the netz, to diminish my sense of dealing with zombie psychology. The only reason I mentioned experimental psychology is that Dan Kahan seems to have deep roots in the ‘rats and stats’ branch which is no recommendation, military/industrial complex and all, if you get my drift.
@Ikonoclast
ok. That’s right. I’ll adjust my view.
@Julie Thomas
Goodoh then. A proper discussion instead of argument 🙂 I’m pleased to see that you are wary of ‘evolutionary psychology’ as potential eugenicists. I share your view. I am a student of genocide. It pays, believe me, genocide has roots everywhere in western culture.
The field of psychology is contested. Is it science? If so, what sort? What’s its genealogy? These questions have been begged, and answered, for at least sixty years, more in some areas.
As it is, I’m interested in what you have to say about the subject of the human mind, psychology and all. From my point of understanding, for example, I see a lot of evidence for the differences between mal and female brain structures which are embedded by culture. I should unpack a little: patriarchal authority structures male and female brains differently. These different structures are what we now study as gender theory. There is an irreducible biology to the reproduction of power structures over time.
MAd as this all might seem, I believe that Alexandra Kollontai had a few answers as to how to address the emerging bio-political realities.
@jungney
One of these ‘eugenicists’ that I follow via his blog is a Physics professor – Steve Hsu. He is a complex and interesting person. He is really into psychometrics which he seems to regard as providing reliable and valid data – amazing to me who is very dubious about IQ data – and he is an avid participant in the search for the gene for intelligence.
The most stupid thing he has said in his blog – this is my idiosyncratic judgement of course – is to announce, seemingly proudly that his 6 year old son wants to be a mathematician when he grows up and his 4 year old daughter wants to be a ballerina – not that there is anything wrong with wanting to be a ballerina.
Steve’s happiness with his daughter’s ‘choice’ provides another example of how cognitive bias affects even very intelligent people. Steve of course is one of the awesome who inhabit the upper end of the IQ scale and in his so very wide and deep understanding of the world, high IQ is God – not profit as most neo-liberals believe – but Steve fully believes that people who make a profit are demonstrating their superior intelligence.
Of course he did a profitable start-up himself and of course he believes that women are less intelligent than men – his wife has a PhD in comparative literature – and that he is being silenced on this topic because of pc.
So despite the fact that his daughter, with such good genes should be very intelligent he does not encourage her to be a mathematician. He does want more people to be intelligent because it will make a better world if everyone is as smart as he is – that is why he takes such an interest in genetics and finding the gene for intelligence …..or so he says, and believes.
You say; “I see a lot of evidence for the differences between male and female brain structures which are embedded by culture.”
I think that if there are inherent differences between male and female brain structures at birth these will be to do with reproduction, otherwise emotional and cognitive differences between men and women are culturally embedded and brain structure is ‘plastic’ more plastic than was thought; so plastic that function can change structure.
“The Brain that Changes Itself” is a good read for some very interesting stuff about brains; by Norman Doidge.
I do remember my father saying to me when I was in primary school and announced that I was going to be a nurse; “no you are not! You are going to be a doctor.” I am very happy that he didn’t want me to be a ballerina; they really suffer from bad feet.
I just wanted to interrupt for a moment to say thank you. To Prof Quiggin and to the many interesting commenters on this blog. I learn so much, on so many topics, (some of which just go whoosh).
Jungney, aren’t you drawing a long bow in linking psychology to eugenics. Surely it takes more than a particular academic line of inquiry to lead to wholesale genocide? You may as well blame genetics, logistics, politics et al. Surely it is legitimate to use our systematic understanding of the human mind to explore what is going on with this particular phenomena where people “wouldn’t know if their a**e is on fire”? Given the gravity of the situation, where people are advocating for, what amounts to, forcing humanity to commit to a collective Russian roulette, such a discussion maybe long overdue. As long we stay clear from pop psychology, thanks.
@Debbieanne
That’s a nice thought. I learn a lot here also. There are often interesting links that take me to new information when I have time to follow them up, as well. Many people are good about providing links (I can’t lately because it’s taking me to moderation , but I try to indicate sources of information)
Hi All,
I hope this post gets past moderation.
Re above somewhere; “convincing people the homogenised data isn’t nonsense”.
We know people do not want to debate the issue as trying to defend the manufactured virtual data and putting alarmists forward as ‘economic heroes’ is like “defending the undefendable”.
JQ said,
“Fortunately, we don’t have to convince people like you, only outnumber you, as we already do.”
Sounds like a Grandiose delusion , (GDs are characterized by fantastical beliefs), especially as the tide is turning and the understanding that AGW is a large scale fraud is gaining traction.
Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis;
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/?optimizely=a
Kind regards,
phoenix
@phoenix
This is a great example of the parallel universe at work. Phoenix clearly hasn’t bothered to click throgh to the original journal article or he would find that the headline is wrong in every respect. The survey population isn’t “scientists” it’s “professionals within petroleum companies, related industries, government regulators, and their professional association” (a mix of petroleum geologists and engineers). Even within this group (including members of the *ONLY* scientific organization in the world that takes a neutral stance on mainstream climate science), the plurality (36 per cent) is characterized as “comply with Kyoto”, while only 24 per cent fit the “sceptic” label preferred by Phoenix.
Sadly, there is (almost) zero possibility that Phoenix, despite being suckered yet again, will change his tribal affilations. Thanks to those affilations, rather to a natural lack of endowment, he really is too stupid to know that his a**e is on fire.
@Ootz
Well, ootz, I knew little enough about evolutionary psychology before reading the Nezt on it and it appears that there is a tendency within the school towards picking human winners on the basis of desired inherited characteristics to do with adaptability in various compartments of the brain. You’ve correctly identified my willingness to draw long bows and it would have been a long bow to target all of psychology with eugenecist leanings but evolutionary psychology stands accused.
It seems that evolutionary psychology has already been identified as the bearer of US anti-liberal views. This is no surprise as the right has been misappropriating Darwin forever – from the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, who was dominant in US sociology for the first half of last century, to EO Wilson’s Sociobiology; Dawkins ‘Selfish Gene’, enthusiastically adopted in the US especially, was once described as so far right wing that was ‘biological Thatcherism’.
My suspicions are always alerted when Darwin is grafted on to a project; it is often a fig leaf of scientific legitimacy. There’s a wiki entry for criticism of evolutionary psychology if you’re into it.
As it stands we are very much in need of genuine attempts to develop critical studies based on a new, ecologically informed, political economy of the way that we must ‘metabolize nature’; one that gives due weight to out mass species presence on the planet. The old new left is having good crack at it but they are shy, like me, of anything that proposes a unified theory of all human social life. The problem with the unified theory mob is that they are positivists and therefore incapable of seeing the forest for the trees; we are, in their view, as atoms, crashing into each other as individuals or billiard balls, which is such a misreading our our species being as to be bizarre.
Generally speaking, I tend not to trust men in labcoats when they speak about the social.
Just to say ootz, I’ve answered you but have been sinbinned by a system that disapproves of my link.
Perhaps phoenix is just a tad overconfident?
@Julie Thomas
It reads to me that you don’t give too much credence to the evolutionary psychologists? I usually leave a room containing anyone who discloses (usually his) astronomical IQ. There are so many intelligences that remain a mystery to the measurers. Have a look at ‘The Mismeasure of Man’; it’s a rip roaring scientific read and a total job on the fallibility of IQ.
You mention brain plasticity. The fact that the brain is plastic undermines the model of the brain developed by the evolutionary psychologists; the two are incommensurable. I agree, there are male/female braain differences as birth, probably in utero. Thereafter, everything is subject to gendering. For example, women victims of child abuse who manifest that abuse in later life usually get a diagnosis of BPD whereas men will get PTSD which is a gendering of the diagnosis itself.
I think that it is possible to use meditation techniques to alter neurological function utilizing the brain’s capacity for rewiring. There’s considerable interest in this in the west although there is an unfortunate tendency to ‘psychologize’ meditation which means that the techniques are disengaged from Buddhist moral/ethical thinking. In any event, my experience is that the methods do actually work.
@phoenix
Surely you must be getting tired of humiliating yourself like this
@jungney
You may be interested in this: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/11/02/plastic-brains/
(No, I haven’t watched the video, but it seems to cover an area which is of interest to you)
@jungney
I think most of the younger evo psych researchers, like Rob Kurzban are very well intentioned but they don’t seem to know how to think about and how to investigate the differences that there are between men and women.
I don’t ‘see’ that these young men have any antagonism toward women or a deliberate if unconscious strategy to believe in hierarchical organisations – ie men are naturally the superior sex – that motivated a lot of the earlier male ideas about human nature and intelligence.
Many do still have the arrogance that comes with seeing themselves as the high point of evolution though and women as the second sex.
Perhaps it just takes more women to be sufficiently motivated to join them and put our ideas about human nature up for discussion. And this will happen as we get more confidence in our ability and more importantly men show some respect for the different perspective women have to offer.
Jungney
My favourite evo psych, is Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
I think you will appreciate this woman’s ideas.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/08/it-does-take-village/
@Julie Thomas
That’s interesting Julie. I generally prefer social historians to evo psychs but it sounds like Hrdy would be worth reading.
As far as historians go, have you read Carolyn Merchant ‘The death of nature’ – one of the early ecofeminist books and very much misunderstood subsequently (probably in part because it is a book about ideas and quite challenging), but hopefully now being revived.
@Julie Thomas
Mr Hsu will live to regret his pride in his children’s ambitions. His son will grow up to be more interested in modern art, and his daughter will become a radical feminist 🙂
I’m reminded of Richard Feynman (another physicist) who had a particular dislike of psychology. Naturally his son ended up studying psychology.
The PM of Australia, Tony Abbott, once again gave a tree stump sermon, preaching the benefits of coal. He is very careful in how he phrases it: he links the fact that modern economies need energy to the fact that coal produces energy, then invites us to (in our minds) connect the dots, i.e. modern economy needs coal to be a modern economy. This is breathtaking: the day after the release of the IPCC report, in which the direness of the situation is patent, our PM comes out with a 100% endorsement of coal. I can only conclude that he is a mere puppet of the coal sector. He really holds the rest of us in contempt, and that includes a significant fraction of those who voted for his government at the last election.
On a separate note, it is no surprise that the public service are in for a right kicking by Abbott’s Team Australians, and no surprise that the politicians are exempt from the incredibly insulting laying waste of pay, conditions, and jobs, in the public service. When did a politician last have to show a productivity gain in order to get a pay rise? Or get a pay rise that is less than inflation? Ha.
@John Brookes
I used to think Feynman was an awesome intellect and then I read somewhere that he – and his son – had laughed at Spinoza and made light of his intellectual ability and that was Richard’s fall from grace for me. Oh well.
I am really pleased to hear that his son – who was very young at the time of the laughter – has become a psychologist.
Val I haven’t liked history since I had to learn all those dates of wars back in high school. I’ve always been more interested in how hunter-gatherer societies worked than what has happened in our civilization. Who knows what motivates this particular obsession? Not me.
@Julie Thomas
I have developed a somewhat Spinozan personal philosophy without having read him. But no doubt his influence has come to me through writers like Tolstoy.
I certainly agree with this (Wikipedia) summing up.
“Thus for Spinoza morality and ethical judgment like choice is predicated on an illusion. For Spinoza, ?Blame? and ?Praise? are non existent human ideals only fathomable in the mind because we are so acclimatized to human consciousness interlinking with our experience that we have a false ideal of choice predicated upon this.”
Julie Thomas,
I’ve always liked history and anthropology over psychology, but my sister is studying the latter and talking to her about it has made me less dismissive. Sometimes I think we choose disciplines that suit our own interests and thinking styles and dismiss others for not suiting us rather than for good reasons (although there are good reasons, as you note with iq and evo-psychology).
History is taught less as the ‘date’ approach now, so you might like it better. There are accounts of kinship societies that you might find interesting if you are interested in hunter-gatherer sorts of societies. The (Marxist) anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote a famous article on the economies (Stone Age Economics), and Marilyn Strathern wrote a post-structuralist book called the Gender of the Gift which from memory is a very thoughtful account of female agency in social structures where the exchange of women between kinship groups was central in maintaining harmony.
@Julie Thomas
Feynman was very, very smart. The sort of smart where you can follow his argument, but later, if you try to recreate it yourself, you can’t do it. But he was only one sort of smart…