We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Politics is irrational because people are only partially rational, and even less so when it comes to politics and other peoples' money. We recently linked to a piece by Stumbling, who asked:
...what role should empirical evidence have in policy-making? Here’s a theory - very little. Evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) is a sham. I say so for four reasons:
Case in point: The Polar Bear story. An entirely healthy bear population is put on the Endangered List for purely political reasons: Who wants a sound bite out there claiming "He or she refused to protect the cuddly Polar Bears."? It makes you sound heartless and evil, and nobody is going to listen to the statistics. It's about sentiment.
However, many of my central beliefs about life are about sentiment too. My belief in the freedom of the individual from the power of the state and of the collective, for example, represents my emotional attachment to our Constitution, its vision, and its cultural underpinnings. To me, a self-evident truth, but some would claim that Resistance is Futile to the power of the Borg.
Courage to tell the truth is rare in politicians, of course, because they have their sinecures to look after (which is rational, if cowardly). I give McCain credit for telling the truth about Ethanol, but it's going to hurt him in the corn states: they want to stay on that gravy train (which is rational on their part, if venal and ignoble). Thus people can be most rational when self-interest is directly involved, and sometimes most irrational when it is not.
Image: Polar Bear with a fresh seal dinner. Cute, cuddly-looking Polar Bears are believed to kill over 40% of the cute cuddly baby seals born each year in the Arctic regions in which they dwell. They do catch adult seals, too. Polar Bears eat the skin and the blubber, and leave the rest.
Editor's note: There is talk going around that the real reason the bears emerged as an issue was as a sentimental proxy issue for preventing drilling in the Arctic, comparable to the familiar "It's for the children..." The thought occurs to me - would this work as well if the bears were black? Is there a racial subtext here? Inquiring minds want to know.
Each of us has muted incentives to study the facts and issues carefully -- and to reflect upon them dispassionately -- because no one of us is responsible for deciding which policies the government will implement.
But Bryan Caplan explains another reason why each of us as a voter generally exercises less wisdom than we do in our private affairs. This other reason springs from what Caplan calls our "preferences over beliefs." Each of us wants to believe certain things. Each of us gets satisfaction simply by holding certain beliefs firm to our hearts. Just as many of us enjoy feeling loyal to our favorite sports teams, many of us enjoy believing that our favorite political party is an especially wise steward of the public interest.
Many of us enjoy believing that our troubles are caused by foreigners. Many of us enjoy believing that if the rich pay higher taxes, middle-class and poor people will be better off. We resist rejecting these beliefs even if the evidence before us suggests that they are mistaken.
Indeed, people are only sometimes rational, and even less often rigidly logical. We are not computers, or Mr. Spocks. In most things humans do, we engage our souls, hearts and our minds, and it is the challenge of adulthood to monitor, critique, and to balance those things in ourselves. For example, were it not for our hearts and souls, it might make sense for us to vote for a thoroughly pragmatic, efficient, and logical Brave New World.
Wisdom is not the same thing as logic, and logic is not the same thing as virtue.
Therefore I am in favor of a degree of irrationality in voting. And, anyway, who is the Grand Arbiter who gets to define "rational voting"? People like Thomas Frank, who believe that it is "rational" to vote yourself other peoples' money? Or "values voters" like me? Politics, government - and life itself -is messy and complicated, and even more so with freedom.
Books that need to be written:
"The Myth of the Rational Human" (well, Freud covered a lot of that ground already)
"The Myth of the Rational and Virtuous Government"
"The Myth of the Rational and Virtuous Politician"
"The Myth of the Rational and Virtuous Bureaucracy"
The Framers understood that the self-interest which in the private sphere contributes to welfare of society — both in the sense of material well-being and in the social unity engendered by commerce — makes man a knave in the public sphere, the sphere of politics and group action. It is self-interest that leads individuals to form factions to try to expropriate the wealth of others through government and that constantly threatens social harmony. John O. McGinnis, The Original Constitution and Our Origins 19 Harv. J.L.& Pub. Policy 251, 253 (1996).
I know that it is trite to tout exercise, but it is worth mentioning that we keep learning more about its health benefits. I recently attended a talk on breast cancer in which daily exercise compared favorably with several widely-used chemotherapy protocols.
Humans were not designed to sit on their butts all day watching TV or reading ephemeral stuff on the Internets.
Is recreational sex a good thing? Good for whom? And how do I define "good"? Does our pop culture contain any sexual morals anymore? Are women naturally as sexually predatory and opportunistic as some men can be? And what does "natural" have to do with it anyway, since we are humans, not monkeys?
Were I a smarter person, I'd have all the answers.
Of course, our government nudges already in innumerable ways - mortgage deductions, for one. Pension deductions and charitable deductions for more on the plus side, and gas and tobacco taxes on the negative side. I happen to be a flat-taxer, on principle: I will give you 13% of my income to pay you off and to preserve our civilization, and I will do whatever I want with the rest.
What principle? The principle that I do not need or want anybody else to "improve" me: My life is my gift from God and nature. It is my problem, my challenge, my adventure, and presents my own dilemmas, my own choices, my own consequences. That is the core and the meaning of human dignity in a free society, and I expect everybody else in my vicinity to buy into that revolutionary and inspiring idea.
The reason I would not waste my time on the book is that, while I respect Sunstein as a smart guy, I do not generally regard him as wise. In this case, the premise that government or government-acquired or politically-processed "expertise" is something that "we the people" want or need - or wish to pay for with our tax money - is absurd. Are we retarded? Everyone in the world these days gets advice from other people, and can get it from anywhere. From Oprah to my doctor to my pastor to the politicians to the internet, everybody seems to be sure that they know how I ought to live.
We are swamped by the Advice du Jour, which usually turns out to be wrong - whether from the government or from anyone else. For one example, if I followed our government's dietary recommendations, I would weigh 300 lbs and resemble the revolting American happily-overfed blimps at Disney World.
What people want, I believe, is a government that has the humility to stay out of our personal lives. That's the way to grow strong, self-sufficient people who do not turn to the government in a dependent, whining, or entitled manner. God, the internet, the library, and our brains are all that we need to take charge of our own lives. Plus we need to know the laws, so we don't break them, because breaking laws is a bad idea.
The arrogance of the Government-Academic Complex never ceases to amuse and to exasperate.
Does Cass run his life better than I run mine? I doubt it. Are his investments doing better than mine? I doubt it. Does he run more miles per week than I do? I doubt it. Is his marriage more fun than mine? I seriously doubt it. Does he have a more interesting life than mine? I doubt it. Is his worship more heart-felt than mine? Doubt it. Does he view me, his fellow Citizen, as somehow pitifully deprived of the wisdom and knowledge of my betters (despite government schools which are supposed to prepare us)? No doubt.
Government is no font of wisdom, and everybody knows that. Here's my message to the condescending experts:
"Shut the hell up, because when it comes to running a life, we are all on training wheels."
If there is an epidemic of drooling pedophile lechers hanging around the beaches, it's news to me, but maybe Maine is different:
York Police Chief Doug Bracy said the statute would represent a fairly minor change that would help keep the public safer, especially children. He noted that York police respond fairly regularly to reports of public peepers on the town's beaches.
Our editor wants a comment about this insanity in which, as Van Helsing puts it, "the government wishes to regulate your eyeball movements."
People are sexual beings. We are many other things too, but that's one thing that we are. We have been given a strong dose of it, and it isn't seasonal like most animals. Is human sexuality "appropriate"? No, often it is not. Nor is human aggressiveness, nor is human fantasy in general.
That's why we learn to keep fantasy in fantasyland, and to keep our behavior in the real world, where the real consequences happen.
One thing that bothers me about the neo-puritanism of the radical feminists is the disingenuous blurring of sexuality with aggression (the wording of the Maine law is a perfect example of the perverse blurring).
At the risk of sounding perhaps too non-traditional for Maggie's, unconscious and sometimes conscious erotic fantasies know no bounds of gender, age, morality, law, or social appropriateness. Everybody knows this and everybody has experienced this, on some level. Socio-cultural taboos, conscience, mental mechanisms like repression, laws, consequences, judgement, the balance of normal impulses, and conventions prevent most of us from behaving like monkeys. Not to mention the fact that we have other interesting or necessary things to do.
However, people who sexually prey on kids are not so much sick as they are simple criminals. Unlike the ancient Greeks, and for better or worse, we have laws about these things.
Break a law, become a crim. It's your choice. But this Maine law, designed to make it easier to prosecute "peepers" as felons satirizes itself. Obviously, the potential for abuse by paranoid Moms is part of the issue here. How does anyone discriminate a peeper from a looker? Everybody likes to look at cute kids, and that is what the neo-puritans can't tolerate.
Is "looking" an action? Not in my book. If it were, I'd be on death row for all of the visual daggers I have thrown.
Most of our lives are guided by gut feelings (aka "unconscious thought") and not by deliberate logical heuristics: just consider merging onto a highway, making friends, picking a mate, tennis, or shooting - or consider how Spaniels catch frisbees or how Labs mark the distant fall of a Canvasback. Our brains can do Multivariate Calculus even if we got a B in Trig, confuse left with right, and were dropped on our heads by our Moms.
Those of us who know the flaws of our mental autopilot systems have to compensate by deliberate thought. That means work.
Gert Gigerenzer is good, and his speech here is relevant to law, investing, medicine, sports, and to life in general. "Knowing" too much can sometimes be a handicap (and we all know how much "data" can be wrong). It's a bit long for our ADD readers (over 1 hr), but it is a paean to the brilliance of the irrationally rational intuitive human brain and a credit to Gigerenzer's logical mind, and well worth the time:
I read compulsively. I read fiction and non-fiction. I read shrink-related stuff also, but less so than other stuff. I read plenty of history. I read 2 books per week. I do not watch TV because it interferes with my reading and my family, and because TV is idiotic. Yes, I am proudly snobbish about many things, and I happily know little-to-nothing about pop culture.
Do I have a Reading Addiction?
Some of my fellow shrinks seem to want to make a diagnosis out of everything people like to do: Internet addiction. As you all say, Good Grief.
New imaging studies are revealing—for the first time—patterns of brain development that extend into the teenage years. Although scientists don't know yet what accounts for the observed changes, they may parallel a pruning process that occurs early in life that appears to follow the principle of "use-it-or-lose-it:" neural connections, or synapses, that get exercised are retained, while those that don't are lost. At least, this is what studies of animals' developing visual systems suggest. While it's known that both genes and environment play major roles in shaping early brain development, science still has much to learn about the relative influence of experience versus genes on the later maturation of the brain. Animal studies support a role for experience in late development, but no animal species undergoes anything comparable to humans' protracted childhood and adolescence. Nor is it yet clear whether experience actually creates new neurons and synapses, or merely establishes transitory functional changes. Nonetheless, it's tempting to interpret the new findings as empowering teens to protect and nurture their brain as a work in progress.
I don't think the human brain ever stops "developing" - or at least changing, as long as we are well-engaged in life and do not turn stagnant.
What I notice most in myself, as I accumulate years, is an increase in what I call mental "clarity." Who knows, maybe it comes from all that synaptical "pruning." Like when you cut back an overgrown, leggy hydrangea or lilac. My tennis court clarity has improved, too. Perhaps my ADD is getting better - or maybe I am a very slow frontal myelinator:
(a) series of MRI studies is shedding light on how teens may process emotions differently than adults. Using functional MRI (fMRI), a team led by Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd at Harvard's McLean Hospital scanned subjects' brain activity while they identified emotions on pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. Young teens, who characteristically perform poorly on the task, activated the amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other "gut" reactions, more than the frontal lobe. As teens grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance. Similarly, the researchers saw a shift in activation from the temporal lobe to the frontal lobe during a language skills task, as teens got older. These functional changes paralleled structural changes in temporal lobe white matter.
That might be the developmental physiology of what is often referred to as "growing up."
The essay, Are We Really That Ill? (in which the author notes that, according to that Psychiatric diagnostic manual "DSM", half of us are mentally ill) in the NY Sun has been referenced frequently this week. And regrettably so, because the author is a Professor of English and knows little of the practice of Psychiatry. I only have the time to address one of his statements:
With over a million copies in print, the manual is known as the bible of American psychiatry; certainly it is an invoked chapter and verse in schools, prisons, courts, and by mental-health professionals around the world.
Yes, it is invoked often - but it is no bible. No well-trained Psychiatrist uses it as a tool for understanding or treatment. It was designed as a research tool, so that researchers would share definitions. It rapidly became a tool for filling out the "diagnosis code" space on insurance forms so that patients might be eligible for some medical reimbursement.
Many of the "diagnoses" listed are not illnesses in any usual sense: nictotine addiction, insomnia, alcohol abuse, post-traumatic stress, personality disorders, ADD, and "adjustment disorder" are just a few examples of the listed items which are common parts of the human condition, but which are subjects of medical research and which are things for which people often ask for help. But they aren't illnesses - they are insurance codes.
A couple of interesting links. First, Dr. Helen asks "Is therapy the new 21st Century punishment?" It's a refreshing perspective. I cannot tell you how many badly-behaved and obnoxious kids are sent to therapists these days, partly because parents cannot give them a whuppin' anymore or they could end up in jail. The moral the kids learn, of course, is that there are no hard consequences for behavior.
Partially, it's the crusade against Hollywood Rationality, the concept that understanding the rainbow subtracts its beauty. The rainbow is still beautiful plus you get the beauty of physics.
and
It is a Hollywood Rationality meme that "Science takes the fun out of life." Science puts the fun back into life.
Getting as close as possible to reality is what shrinks think about all the time.
That's the sort of thing that Freud, a Neurologist by training, aspired to do, but the data wasn't there at the time and he gave up on the effort.
I know of Dr. Shore, and I will read the book. The reviews are impressive. ("Affect" is a fancy shrink word for emotions.) I think the reason it had not attracted my attention is because I react against any title with the word "self" in it. That word turns me off because it makes no sense to me, and neither do the theoretical constructs referring to it.
Politics is irrational because people are only partially rational, and even less so when it comes to politics and other peoples' money. We recently linked to a piece by Stumbling, who asked:
post to del.icio.us
Donald Boudreaux considers his colleague Bryan Caplan's much-discussed book, 
Is recreational sex a good thing? Good for whom? And how do I define "good"? Does our pop culture contain any sexual morals anymore? Are women naturally as sexually predatory and opportunistic as some men can be? And what does "natural" have to do with it anyway, since we are humans, not monkeys?
It's about "nudging," and our blog friend 
Staying in the 
If there is an epidemic of drooling pedophile lechers hanging around the beaches, it's news to me, but maybe Maine is different: