Since Jackie is quite attractive (if the pics circulating are really her), the only way that she would have trouble getting men would be if she gave off the vibe of being mentally unstable.

There are some pretty feminists, but they’re either crazy or socially inept autistic types.

Dear anti-feminists: we’re not returning to the 1950s. Ever. Technology is a bitch, isn’t it?

Uh, not so sure about this one? Women who like staying home with babies are, shockingly, the ones who have the most children. Since all behavioural traits are heritable, we’re likely to get a female population which has, on average, a strong innate desire to stay home and have babies. #realityhurts

And not at all like the Left Coast cultures either.

Both are pretty rough, isolated places and still have a frontier like atmosphere, with lots of transients. Very lumberjack-y. Not at all like the placid, settled farming cultures on the Canadian prairies.

Canada and the U.S. would pretty much be identical in politics if not for a. Quebec and b. the South. Conservative means pretty much the same thing as it does in the U.S., except with single payer healthcare for everyone.

Canada would be much more right wing, with the Conservative party actually quite dominant, if not for Quebec. Vote splitting on the right has also been a problem in the past. The three Westernmost, and most prosperous, provinces have been governed for a while now by very libertarian political parties. Even fruity British Columbia.

The could be better at separating Inuit from Amerindian in the North too.

The map is broadly correct. However there are two problems I see. The area north of Lake Superior is it’s own culture, not at all like Southern Ontario, which it is grouped with. The same thing with the mountainous interior of British Columbia, which is not continuous with prairie culture.

Yes, one might wonder about different Germans in different places. The Germans in Minnesota, ND and SD lean strongly to the right.

I took a look at the counties in the Dakotas and Minnesota that went either Republican or Democratics in the last few presidential elections.

Counties in the Dakotas that tended to go Democratic in a presidential election were either:
1. Heavily Norwegian
2. Had a large Amerindian population.

Counties in the Dakotas that went Republican tended to have a large German population.

Counties in Minnesota that tended to go Democratic in a presidential election were either:
1. Heavily Norwegian
2. Had a large Amerindian population.
3. Had a very diverse population, particularly in the Twin Cities area, but also places like Deluth.

Counties in Minnesota that went Republican tended to have a large German population.

Surprisingly, in neither place did Swedes make much of a difference.

Not even wrong.

“This attitude — which, I hasten to add, is not one Matthen himself expresses in his review — is, I think, very common, but it is grounded in an illusion. To see the fallacy, consider an analogy I’ve used many times before. Suppose someone is cleaning the house and carefully sweeps the dirt out of each room into a certain hallway, where he then proceeds to sweep the various piles of dirt he’s created under a certain rug. You tell him that that’s all well and good, but that he has still failed to get rid of the dirt under the rug itself and cannot do so using the same method. He replies:

Are you kidding? The “sweep it under the rug” method is one long success story, having worked everywhere else. How plausible is it that this one little rug in this one little hallway would be the only holdout? Obviously it’s just a matter of time before it yields to the same method. If you think otherwise you’re just flying in the face of the facts — and, I might add, the consensus of the community of sweepers. Evidently you’ve got some sentimental attachment to this rug and desperately want to think that it is special somehow. Or is it some superstitious religious dogma you’re trying to salvage? What do you think it is, a magic carpet?

The sweeper thinks his critic is delusional, but of course he is himself the delusional one. For the dirt under the rug is obviously the one pile which the “sweep it under the rug” method cannot possibly get rid of, and indeed the more successful that method is elsewhere, the more problematic the particular pile under the rug becomes. The sweeper’s method cannot solve the “dirt under the rug problem” precisely because that method is the source of the problem — the problem is the price the method’s user must pay for the success it achieves elsewhere.

Now this delusion is exactly parallel to one to which many naturalists are prone. As Nagel writes in Mind and Cosmos:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand — how this physical world appears to human perception — were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind — as well as human intentions and purposes — from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (pp. 35-36)

This is a theme in Nagel’s work that goes back to his famous 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, and as I have emphasized in earlier posts in this series, it is crucial to understanding what he says in the new book. Human beings are like the hallway in my example, and the human mind is like the rug. The “mathematically precise quantitative description” of the natural world provided by modern science has been as successful as it has been only because those aspects of the natural world that don’t fit that method — irreducibly qualitative features like color, sound, etc. as they appear to us (as contrasted with scientific redefinitions of color, sound, etc. in terms of such quantifiable features as surface reflectance properties, compression waves, and the like); and final causes, teleology, or purposes — were swept under the rug of the mind, re-characterized as purely “subjective,” as mere projections that only seem to be features of the external world but are really only aspects of our perceptual representation of it.

As Nagel says, it was precisely this methodological revolution that created the mind-body problem, just as the “sweep it under the rug” method in my example creates a “dirt under the rug problem.” If you essentially define the physical in such a way that it excludes color, sound, purpose, etc. as they appear to us in ordinary experience, and define the mental in such a way that it is the repository of these qualities you have removed from the physical world, then you have carved up the conceptual territory in a way that rules out from the get-go an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical. Far from constituting a desperate resistance to the implications of the scientific revolution, dualism of this essentially Cartesian sort was a consequence of that revolution. (And again, color, sound, etc. as they appear to us are to be distinguished from color, sound, etc. as redefined by physics — though they are sometimes conflated by sloppier naturalists.)

Early modern thinkers like Cudworth and Malebranche made of this new conception of the physical an explicit argument for dualism, and more recent dualists like Richard Swinburne have done the same. Naturalists like Nagel, John Searle, and Alva Noë do not endorse dualism, but they do see that the methodological revolution in question is the source of the mind-body problem, and thus can hardly in any obvious way provide a solution to it. It is the height of philosophical and historical superficiality to suppose otherwise.”

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2013/03/nagel-and-his-critics-part-vii.html

But the differences in religious ideas between religions can have material consequences, sometimes in socially significant ways.

So, for example, Islamic societies could have more tendencies towards violence, just because of the religious ideas in Islam.

Science has failed, massively, to establish how matter can produce something like consciousness in a mechanistic way. Nor does the problem seem solvable even in principle. See Chalmers, Searle, Nagel, Feser etc.

Science is really good at explaining the kinds of things that science is good at explaining, which is a lot of stuff. It’s not good at explaining everything.

The psychological tendencies which give rise to religion can be directed in many different channels, though of course there are limits.

A scientist needs to be open to mechanistic explanations, but that is entirely different from believing everything is mechanistic.

Where does religious belief come from?

There is at least some historical contingency to a people’s religious beliefs. For example, it might be that Islam or Buddhism is a better fit for the average mental tendencies of people in South America. Doesn’t matter, the Catholics got there first. Funny too how Islamic countries are almost all geographically contiguous with Arabia, with a wide variety of geographic, social and economic differences included in that geographically contiguous area, which would, of course, mean the evolution of different mental tendencies adapted to local conditions. Pretty much the only thing they have in common is their spatial proximity to the Muslim homeland.

Yeah, to be a scientist, all that is required is the belief that at least some aspects of the universe can be explained mechanistically. However, it is not required that you believe all aspects of the universe be explicable mechanistically. The latter is a philosophical, not a scientific, position.

Now, it may be helpful for a scientist to be at least open to mechanistic explanation everywhere, even in sensitive areas like human behaviour. And atheists aren’t just open to mechanistic explanation, they expect it. Hence, they are often better at science than people who prefer to appeal to personal rather than impersonal, mechanistic causation. Religion can easily gum up the works. But there is no requirement that a scientist believe everything has such an impersonal, mechanistic explanation.

Science is great at explaining the things that are amenable to scientific explanation, which happens to be a lot more than we thought was possible.

Your hypothesis appears to be that it does not matter what religion a particular people has, and that the type of religion one has does not change how one behaves enough to account for differences in behaviour among groups with different religions. That has not been proven.

Islam has been adopted in many places and by many different kinds of peoples, yet everywhere it seems to come into violent conflict with its neighbours. There is the saying, “Islam has bloody borders” and of the 7% of wars where religion has been involved in, Islam has been involved in half of those, more than any other religion. So, I’d say it is at least possible that the specific tenets of a religion, like Islam, can have an effect on behaviour.

Now, it is still possible that the genetic tendencies of the peoples who have adopted Islam may be the main factor in why Muslims have tended to be so violent. It just happened that way, or Islam may appeal to peoples who already have some violent tendencies. Or it may be that both genetics and the tenets of the religion bear some of the blame. But one cannot say that genetics is definitely the cause of this tendency to be violent.

As they say, more research is necessary.

I don’t know what we can do to protect gays when the gay germ is found, but I do applaud you for at least thinking about it. We really do need to think what we can do to minimize the violence.

I also think we need to be thinking about how to manage the return of religion to the West. As a conservative, I generally applaud this, but religious people have their peculiar biases and there will be downsides. We need to start thinking about how to minimize those too.

Have you bought Bryan Caplan’s book yet:

Lot’s of stuff on how to reduce parenting stress.

BTW congrats!

New Edition?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAFg2TQk9v0

It’s an interesting question whether one’s political persuasion should be described by the actual policies one favours or by the moral intuitiions one uses to reach those policies. I presume by describing yourself as very liberal you mean that you start off with strong liberal moral intuitions, such as Haidt’s harm/care and justice/fairness, and are relatively indifferent to the conservative moralfoundations of loyalty/ingroup, respect for authority, and purity/holiness. Yet, your knowledge of how the world actually works, leads you to embrace actual policies that are not all that different from mine, and I’m an arch-reactionary (at least by today’s standards).

I agree this isn’t likely to work. Religious people just seem to inherently place more value on the family than secular people. They are much more likely to see their identity as being part of a group extending both into the past and the future. Liberals on the other hand tend to see themselves as autonomous individuals. Children are nice, but only as one of many lifestyle options.

The other thing is that if feminists were to convince young women to stay home and have children earlier in life (so as to preserve feminism, of course) that basically defeats the purpose of feminism. Not gonna happen.

There may just be a real discrepancy between the number of children people really want and the number they achieve. I will give a couple examples. One girl I know, very ambitious, scholarly looks to be headed for a high flying academic career. On the other hand she often posts pictures of herself on Facebook holding some baby of her relatives’. My guess is she really likes kids. My other guess is that she’ll spend so much time in school that she’s not going to have as many kids as she’d like. The other is a medical resident doing a 5 year specialty whom I personally had been dating until a few months ago. She _loves_ kids, but she’s now 33. Realistically, she’s not going to have any until she’s at least 35. That’s rough for her.

Summary: people still like kids. They just have so many other things they want to do too that they end up with fewer kids.

It seems like things such as intensive parenting, intensive education etc. can all have a pretty significant short term impact, but it all tends to fade as people get older. Dweck’s priming exercises seem to be similar.

This isn’t to say that things in the social environment can’t have a significant impact in certain areas, it’s just that intelligence doesn’t seem to be one of those areas.

Seeing your disagreement with T., I thought you might be interested in all of Dweck’s actual papers here:
https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/cdweck

Don’t quote me on this, but I don’t see that any of her work tracks actual IQ scores longitudinally.

People do seem particularly disgusted with male-male anal intercourse, but they also dislike male-male kissing, oral sex and mutual masturbation. There seems to be a dislike of homosexual relationships in the abstract, not just when performing one particularly disgusting sex act.

RE: 10 000 Year Explosion

Those weren’t entirely new traits though. Children have always had lactose tolerance. Compared to other species even the lowest IQ human populations are extremely smart. Those were both extensions of things humans already had.

I’m not really sure about this. I’m not sure if we’ve had homosexuality long enough for a whole new trait, homophobia, to evolve in response to it. Doesn’t Greg Cochran think that homosexuality only arrived with agriculture?

Homophobia seems to be stronger in men, who take care of children less. Men also seem to use homophobia as a kind of social bond.

Aversion to homosexual acts could have specifically evolved as a way to keep males from trying to have sex with other males of the same species, who after all are the closest thing to a female of the same species.

Or it could be that we just find sex in general disgusting unless our disgust is overrun by attraction. Though we don’t seem to be all _that_ disgusted by sex in other species. We even tell stories to our children of romantic relationships between humans and half-human creatures, like centaurs and mermaids. But maybe we just view sexual acts as particularly degrading of us as humans, unless overrun by attraction, of course.

The problem is that conservatives defer to authority and the authorities right now are various forms of liberalism (libertarianism, neo-conservatism). So contemporary conservatives are kind of schizophrenic and all over the place. But as conservatives become a bigger portion of the population, substantively conservative views will have more and more cultural authority and more and more cultural leaders will have conservative views. Once such views have more authority they will be reinforced by conservatives tendency to defer to whoever is in power.

I think you are right though that a more religious society will be more and more anti-science. Religious people prefer explanations that involve personal causation while science prefers explanations with impersonal causation.