Now would I say something that wasn’t true … oh sorry, that Eurythmics tune always plays in my mind
[and now yours] when I think of those words, which I do surprisingly frequently. And isn’t it nice, as these intelligent fellows discuss at the beginning of this podcast, when one of your pet theories seems to be backed up by science, or at least your fellow flawed humans.
The pet theory of mine is that some sense of morality is innate, a conclusion I came to thinking about lying, and how you always know if you have lied, pretty much, before all the self-delusions come along and fix up your memory for you. One of the reasons I think about lying a lot is because of the difficulty of teaching a child when it is okay to lie, which certainly ties in with the question of whether or not you are helping a morality gene express itself because the behaviours associated with it have proved favourable, or whether you are squashing a genetic tendency that has proved fatal in the past. And of course for lots of unfortunate children growing up under the care of irrational and arbitrary parents or guardians, lying is often an essential survival tool.
I have been thinking about writing a series of books for very little people, and one of the titles that keeps popping into my mind is Ifnit and Timpi Tell a Lie [Ifnit and Timpi have been inside my head for a long time, I should explain, and never quite grew up]. The most basic lie we all tell is when we answer “fine”, when asked how we are. It is a little social grease that seems a necessary start to many an interaction, but when is it ever true? Sometimes things are great, fantastic, bizarre, alarming, horrific, sad beyond belief, incredibly happy, ludicrous and maybe all those things at once, but fine? I am about as fine as my day is nice! So when should Ifnit and Timpi lie, getting back to innate morality?
“I did not sleep with that woman!” Yes, well. It might have gone over a little better if he hadn’t called her ‘that woman’, which pretty much signalled the lie, but we know that he knew that he was lying. And the problem with that lie was that it was a pure self-interest lie, and the problem with that amoral liar was that he was always too self-interested, which is the only kind of person who would ever be able to become president [but I digress].
Let me let these two, who have actually studied the question, add to the discussion, bringing science to help us delude ourselves that our emotional response was right all along, but making it justifiable by trying to prove that an innate sense of cooperation rather than pure self-interest is a very missed part of the economic question; and that while individually we [who us? aye, all of us!] are unable to use reason clearly because of our emotional and cultural blinkers
collectively we are quite good at making decisions, from the correct price for a bunch of bananas, to building much larger social constructs.
Jonathan Haidt of New York University and author of The Righteous Mind talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his book, the nature of human nature, and how our brain affects our morality and politics. Haidt argues that reason often serves our emotions rather than the mind being in charge. We can be less interested in the truth and more interested in finding facts and stories that fit preconceived narratives and ideology. We are genetically predisposed to work with each other rather than being purely self-interested and our genes influence our morality and ideology as well. Haidt tries to understand why people come to different visions of morality and politics and how we might understand each other despite those differences.
I hope you are fine today! I know I will be, at least if you ask me … but would I lie to you?
this is good right here, around the 20 minute mark. this sums up my sentiments well.
” And I realized–you know, I think Liberals are right about a lot of important issues and rising inequality and some sort of things we ought to do to get a capitalist system to function humanely. They are right on a lot of important issues. But in doing the research, I came to see that, wow, Conservatives, if your criterion is how to run a healthy society that actually leads to flourishing and well-being, actually Conservatives and libertarians are right on a lot of things, too. So now I consider myself a centrist who finds a lot of wisdom on all sides but not much in the current Republican Party. me too. too much hate. too much blame. all criticism, no solution – other than tear it all down to the ground – yeah its reactionary alright, which real simply means TOO FAR RIGHT!
20:00 Russ: We’re going to come back to that maybe toward the end. I raised the issue about your personal views, which usually are irrelevant in our conversations, but in this one I think they are– Guest: They are relevant. Russ: They are somewhat important. But it raised an interesting issue just as a sidenote, which is, I find as I’ve tried to become more tolerant, as I get older–I don’t know if I’ve been successful–but we talk a lot on this program about how we have to be aware of our own tendencies to self-deceive; we have to be humble. It’s a very Hayekian viewpoint, that we don’t understand everything; there are limits to reason. One of the possible outcomes of that is that you lose faith in your principles, because you start to realize, you know, the other guy, he’s well-intentioned as well as I am. And I don’t have a monopoly on truth.”
Psychobabble. Humans are 90% chimp and 10% bee (and bees are just a bunch of brothers and sisters). Where did those numbers come from? He admittedly made them up.
Kids have an intuitive understanding of physics? Maybe so, but did that experiment rule out babies’ knowledge of depth perception? His horse example sure doesn’t buttress that theory. Have you ever seen a newborn horse? I have. They have no depth perception until they learn it. They will walk off a cliff if it is in front of them or into a tree. Do dogs have an innate sense of geometry? Throw a stick into a flowing river and see what happens. They will probably take the wrong angle at first but quickly adjust so that they catch the stick before it floats past them.
99 weeks was the most unemployment you could get with the extended benefit program, not 5 years!
The minimum wage is overwhelmingly bad for poor people. O.k., Russ- you be you and I’ll be someone making $7.75/hr. Convince me why I don’t want $10.10.
But, and it’s a big but, I agree that the schools do not need more money.
There would be more but I had to stop 2/3 through.
i listened to the first 20 minutes or so, then stopped to post. then i realized you can also read it, and i am a fast reader so i read the entire interview from the beginning. i do not really have too much argument with what he had to say. i like his idea that no one has a lock on what the right answer is, on just about anything.
the chimp and bees part is at 32:09 minutes. i’m OK with the general idea, but why not 60/40, 50/50? i just reread that part. he must flesh that out better in the book.
i didn’t object to the horse example either. i think he is taking a position in between all “nature” or all “nurture” is all.
the mininum wage issue i might have to agree with ya Dude. if a company can’t afford to pay a living wage, then maybe they shouldn’t be in business. and it isn’t necessarily the fault of the business owner that he cannot afford to pay more either.
this was a good thinking exercise for me Xty. i’m even less partisan than i was before.
i think the first thing the USA should do to save itself is eliminate all political representatives, and use the savings to make sure everyone has the ability to direct vote – educate and also supply the technology to vote with – internet. we’d still save money and the system would be much fairer.
right now i’d go just about anywhere to get out of the cold.
On today’s post, Barry Ritholtz linked back to a post from exactly one year ago today, where he had the opportunity to walk a few blocks to lunch in -45F wind chills. It’s a delightful read. As soon as he said “no hat”, I knew he was screwed.
Cheer up peckerwood. It’s going to be colder next week. 😛
i can’t find anything solid on why gold popped. some speculation on India only. i thought 1250 mattered more.
nice article EO. i totally respect the stop light situation. do you remember those damn stop lights on State Street! i think the longest one was at Johnson, or was it Gorham. i remember sometimes just going for it through traffic. it was like playing frogger. but getting hit by a car was worth the risk when you feared freezing to death on your way to class. and then there is the famous walk bridge in Eau Claire…
http://www.wqow.com/story/24359775/2014/01/03/uw-eau-claire-ranked-fifth-coldest-college-in-the-nation
I just noticed gold’s pop. I had 1240 as a significant number but the pop might mean we just averaged out of some stuff.
I agree that some of the stuff in the podcast was babble, but I do find the nature versus nurture argument very interesting and someone’s belief in the basic nature of a human greatly affects how they think that person should be governed. I always believed that my children were savages that needed to be civilized, more than butterflies that needed to express themselves without guidance. I also think that they are absolutely right about the evidence being in that a controlled economy like one sees under communism produces poverty and misery greater than that produced under capitalism, and that libertarians are right but have no feelings, and liberals are right but have no reason. Logic versus compassion. But maybe having a mix of those types of people actually helps to create a system of compromise.
Right now everything is so distorted because of the complete destruction of the value of fiat currency over the past century and the funnelling of money to the financial sector who seem to have used it to build condos for politicians to inhabit, both here and in the Caribbean, that one cannot really judge the merits of any system of governance. They have all been lured into a fantasy land of debt, and are not even close to waking up it would appear. The death of the penny says it all. But escaping the money economy is not currently possible, or even desirable. I love my macbook. And my iPhone, which I just found out has another keyboard called emoji that has the most insane number of emoticons. Everything a trade off.
Btw, my mind is a complete fog. Bad flare up, had to cancel even athletic therapist. Ouch on the couch!
I remember going on a week long school trip in Grade 8 to a place called Dorset north of Toronto and the evil gym teacher, Mr Stulak made us get up and go for a jog before breakfast – and I remember our eyelashes freezing together. My poor eldest has a spot of frostbite on her face from a walk to the bus to get to school in -30 C. This is definitely a very cold winter, but we always get these long freezes around now. It was being this cold even back in December and the relentlessness of it that makes it noteworthy.
I was not surprised to see that Barry’s article took place in Winnipeg. Windypeg. It is odd enough that we choose to live in Ottawa. Choosing Winnipeg must be very interesting indeed. I remember learning that it was the test capital of North America, and that if a product sold in Winnipeg it would sell everywhere.
I also watched that documentary about Swedish crime writers – speaking of people greatly affected by their climate, and not necessarily in a good way. It was strangely interesting too, such a small society so they can be so self-aware.
A friend just called me from Hawaii. 80 yesterday. She said most of the people she has encountered on her vacation there are from Canada.
We call them Snowbirds. Little colonies of Canadians ducking the winter all over the southern US. Strange trailer parks full of Quebecois in Florida, richer enclaves of English in the Bahamas. I envy each and every one of them right now. I hope they are being good tourists.
http://www.snowbirds.org/home
I don’t seem to be able to post a link, but they even have an organization fighting for their rights!
edit: and now it is a link? Good grief. Something wrong with me or the matrix!
your writing is coming across most lucid today Xty. i’ll take some of that fog.
i believe that Adam Smith, who was a ‘Moral Philosopher’ had it figured out 300 years ago. free markets were the goal, but not practical because of man’s nature. he never believed that we could have no government, or no regulation.
i look at the situation in the USA as objectively as i can. i was born in 1965. the 1970’s as i remember, were not good times by any stretch, so the policies enacted in the 60’s didn’t work, at least not completely. from 1980 on, the country has steadily removed progressive policies, calling it Reagonomics, Supply Side, Neo-liberal, Neo-conservative, etc. this has occurred pretty much through my entire adult life. now i look around and all i see is the damage from regressive taxation, deregulation, lax anti-trust enforcement, greed is good, socialism is bad, and i could go on. i just do not know how these people on the far right can still be blaming the so called liberals for everything! i couldn’t even vote yet the last time the USA had a liberal president. and could it be any more obvious that OBAMA is no stinking liberal!!!
i think that too many people are looking for a scapegoat, and the politicians are more than willing to help them find one. the last thing the politicians want is the sheople to figure out that they have been screwed over from the very top on down, and that this has been the only progressive trend in the last 40-50 years.
rate this rant. 🙂
😳 😛 ❗
That was my rant rate, in case you were wondering.
since no one else has anything to add… it seems to me that even across the entire political spectrum in the USA, most all will agree that corporate money plays a bigger role in the elections and in the legislative process every year. i submit that there will be no “progress” until this trend changes, let alone any chance of a liberal ever being elected president again! one plus two equals three, and A comes before B which comes before C. yes, i was stupid enough to go to college, and yes, i was even dumber when i got out. but i will stand behind the logic of my argument none the less. 🙂
wish you were here 44.
edit: i think that’s a good score Xty. thank you. but saw it too late so i extended my rant.
I have a dichotomy between my own real life experiences, and what the people who shape the history books have been telling me ever since.
I was born in 1960. My parents were Depression babies, who scrimped and saved, drove beater cars, on and on, until finally their ship started to come in, in the 1970’s. Their first NEW CAR was a 1972 Ford station wagon. One of those huge old landcruisers that they don’t dare make anymore. 400 cubic inch V8 engine. It was a behemoth. Life in my little world was good in the 1970’s, and just kept getting better.
It was only later, when the agenda driven “historians” got ahold of the narrative that the 70’s were cast to be so horrible. Gas lines, inflation, Carter was horrible, Reagan saved us all from (fill in the blank). Gee Whiz, I wonder if there was a purpose in emphasizing this version of history? I was there, and I loved the 70’s. My parents did too.
The 60’s, on the other hand, in my memory, were horrible. I remember as an 8 year old, in 1968 or 1969, laying on the couch with the TV on, thinking how bad things were in the world. I had a couple a grandparents die. Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Riots in the streets. Yup, horrible. But the 70’s? I’d do the whole decade over again in a heartbeat.
The 80’s? The beginning of a new Dark Age in many ways. That Rat Bastard Reagan. And it continues to this day. On 9/11, I knew immediately that the curtain was really going to come down. Repressive government was going to have it’s way for the foreseeable future.
But I had a blast and not a care in the world in the 70’s.
i think i would have liked the 70’s but i was born a few years too late. i remember the gasoline shortages, inflation, and 3 Mile Island – oh and Tricky Dick calling it quits! (i was 9) i feel i missed out being born in 1965 really – the only time in my life things in the USA seemed positive was during the Clinton years – and it didn’t last that long. (passing no judgement on his presidency here at all.) i’m not a boomer, and i don’t identify at all with the X’rs. i should start a support group!
i would have been 9 here too but i didn’t go 🙁 .
roll a fatty, kick off the slippers, and hit play.
Even though it was a rhetorical question…. “would i lie to you?”… no, Xty wouldn’t lie. And if she did she would feel badly about it. likely worse than the person who was lied to, if they knew.
in fact, Xty probably feels bad just thinking that certain things might possibly have somehow been a lie, or partly a lie, or EVEN in the light of, or context in, that which might somehow be similar to one in which lies are told.
“It’s all good Baby BABY!”
That’s the lyric line that often goes through my head and was going through my head when I clicked to xtybacq.com. How funny to find this post about a lyric line going through your head when I was actually considering how that line so often goes through mine.
No matter how crooked the lying headlines, or unjust markets are, it really doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I actually kind of feel sorry for the worst of the “I did not have sex with that woman” types, as payday might be a little rough for them. I don’t condone lying, or lie(at least by my standards!!lol)… But when i unemotionally connect the dots of the world, i guess “it’s all good baby BAaByyy” pops into my head… as a way of laughingly passing by all the junk with a surety that payday is coming and the bad will be sorted out.
Now, I’m a 46 year old (as of tuesday) white guy who only knows the title and artist to one rap song in the whole world. I drive an old jeep, have many Bibles, Guns, and prefer the music from EOs favorite decade (70s). So why this line, this song?… there’s certainly no cultural connection,.. i don’t know “But It’s All Good!!” lol
Xty, don’t even click on the link. The lyrics, the language… terrible.
But if thinking about lies and the icky stuff of the world gets you down, feel free to borrow “It’s all good baby BAaByyy” from me and Big E Smalls!!! lol
I thought the 70s were great too! Just looking at music by decade you can get a feel for the whole thing it seems to me, and music in the 80’s began to suck. Of course, I am undoubtedly showing my age. I was born in 62. I think my life was a lot like EO’s – parents were children of immigrants and worked hard and saved their money and made it, so to speak, also beginning to feel they could spend a little more in the seventies – take a holiday down south, we bought a new Zodiac and 7.5 mercury for me! at the cottage – things just relaxed. But I do worry that some of that was the beginning of the debt grab, and since both my parents worked for the university, their pay scale was set by theory not reality and my dad’s pension, paying out 18 years after his death, was insanely generous by any accounting scheme.
It has certainly been very different being Canadian – just the way you talk of your presidents, and how they are used to sum up time – I just don’t think of the Mulroney years, or the Trudeau years – our prime ministers somehow fail to run the narrative so they just aren’t the heroes of our story, much as they try. I am absolutely convinced that your president has far too much power and governs far too many people who live in a geographically varied country with very different needs in different areas. It is silly to think one person can unite 300 million. Height of hubris, not just from the president, but from the people too.
Oh no – Youtube has stripped itself of all sorts of major label music – youngest offspring kind of explained – yikes.
good morning all. DN, you are the kid here then. always remember to respect your elders. 🙂
i think all of us have plenty in common. i believe in your payday DN, and on many levels too. i was thinking last night about it again before bed, and also doing some reading. the gist of it is that those that are expounding the philosophy of dog eat dog, are just rationalizing their own evil. then there is also the rhetoric. the lemmings need to quit repeating the talking points, and think them through logically. follow the money as they say.
but there are also those that have no conscience. people like that think you are weak and stupid if you play fair. we should talk about the topic of sociopathy here some time Xty. i think i can share some insights.
the you-tube situation is just more of the same. every freaking penny has to be accounted for. but it’s not the artists themselves benefiting from it. a true artist creates whether paid or not. on a positive note, i have been finding a lot of new old stuff on you-tube lately, especially live music from the 70’s!
i’ll be around home again today. so i will post some live rock later! hope everyone has a nice Frigg’s Day.
Oh and Happy Birthday DN. It just keeps on getting worse, but gosh 46 sounds young! A veritable spring chicken!
I think sociopaths are a very interesting topic of discussion. It is a very specific disorder and it is certainly interesting in the context of nature vs nurture as well. Mental illness has crept very close to me and my life, and what is someone’s nature, and when does one alter that nature, is a very difficult problem. What is a drug is another very interesting question, too. But sociopaths are particularly dangerous because of their complete disregard for others. Not so much a danger to themselves, as most mental illness tends to be. The question of who would want to be president I also think should be considered – it is possible that the job only attracts narcissistic sociopaths as does the CEO position to a large degree. Maybe I will cobble together a post about it.
well not the 70’s, but it does reflect my detached amusement today watching the financial markets, and it is very much live.
last one. you’re up 44.