If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren’t There More Happy People? (2)

Second post in the series, first one is here. As already mentioned the book is a collection of quotes, and it contains quite a few really brilliant quotes I have not seen elsewhere. Some more samples, covering the letters B and C:

i. “As I get older I seem to believe less and less and yet to believe what I do believe more and more.” Gerald Brenan.

ii. “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” Isaac Asimov.

iii. “The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.” Walter Bagehot.

iv. “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Mark Twain.

v. “Everyone has a book in them and that, in most cases, is where it should stay.” Christopher Hitchens.

vi. “When I was four, I told my mother I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up. She said, ‘You can’t do both.’” Steven Tyler.

vii. “The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy … neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” John Gardner.

viii. “The feeling of having taken a wrong turning in life was made worse by the fact that he could not, for the life of him, remember having taken any turnings at all.” Charles Fernyhough.

ix. “You can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back.” Beverly Rubik.

x. “A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another’s.” Jean Paul Richter.

xi. “Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside of an adverticing agency.” Raymond Chandler. I beg to differ, but sometimes I do think along similar lines when it comes to the very best players – what could the people at the very top have accomplished if they’d focused their energy elsewhere?

xii. “I have found the best way to give advice to children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.” Harry Truman.

xiii. “Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.” Mao.

xiv. “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” Rich Cook.

xv. “No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why.” Mignon McLaughlin.

xvi. “Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.” Benjamin Disraeli.

xvii. “There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.” Rebecca West.

xviii. “The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want. Men do not become tyrants so as not to suffer cold.” Aristotle.

xix. “Honest criticism is hard to take – especially when it comes from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.” Franklin P. Jones.

The difference

Yesterday:

“StumbleUpon: 1
Google Reader: 1
ptitlien.com/ssbsv: 1
(google images links): 2

Total views referred by links to your blog: 5″

Today:

“180grader.dk: 79
Facebook: 2
Google Reader: 1
(another google images link): 1

Total views referred by links to your blog: 83″

Most likely none of those ~80 additional readers will ever revisit the blog. But I’m still surprised at the impact such a link can have. Of course the number keeps growing at the moment as more people click the link.

I should probably thank William for putting up the link – done.

A Natural History of Ourselves (1)

By Hannah Holmes.

“Whenever biologists discover a new animal it’s their custom to crank the creature through a factual sausage grinder, producing tidy links of information. With academic detachment they tabulate the number of legs and teeth, note food preferences, and characterize habits of reproduction. [...] But I’ve never encountered a full description of the two-legged ape. We Homo sapiens, so eager to describe the rest of the world, have been chary about committing our own natural history to paper.
This seems unfortunate. For one thing, it reinforces the notion that we’re not normal animals. It lends the impression that we’re too wonderful to summarize; that although the giraffe can be corralled in paragraphs, the human cannot. That’s unfair to other species. On the flip side, it suggests we’re misfits, as animals go. It lends the impression that we’re not worthy to take our place beside the gemsbok and the gorilla; that we are excluded from the brotherhood of mammals. This is unfair to my species.
It also seems unnecessarily dour. What could be more fun than describing the human, after all?”

From the introduction. The book is quite funny and you learn a lot of new stuff. That said, it also gets a few things wrong, and I’ve gotten a bit annoyed a couple of times because she keeps repeating a common mistake people make when dealing with evolutionary bioloy: Assuming traits or behavioural strategies which are widespread today must necessarily have been advantageous in the past. It’s an easy mistake to make, but it’s the wrong way to think about these things: A general rule of thumb is rather that all it takes for a given trait to persist over time is for the trait to not be so costly as to give rise to a significant evolutionary disadvantage. Traits that impact the number of offspring in a positive way will generally spread (if certain other conditions are met), but neutral traits and adaptions can easily persist over time as well. Harmful traits are the only ones that generally have a hard time making it over time, and if you see the trait in individuals today and it’s been around for a while, the trait probably isn’t all that harmful – at least in terms of offspring impact, likelihood of mating ect.. She makes the mistake both when talking about traits more or less directly linked to genetics (‘color blindness has persisted because: “it gave hunters an advantage in spotting khaki-colored animals in the khaki-colored grasslands of human prehistory”) and also when talking about purely cultural adaptions (according to her, the new HIV study showing that circumcision reduces infection risk (slightly) might indirectly be part of the explanation why people thousands of years ago decided to cut off parts of the penis of their male children and keep doing it – “If circumcision does indeed reduce the risk of males contracting fatal diseases, that could well have kicked “cultural evolution” into gear long, long ago: Those groups of humans who practiced the cultural behavior would enjoy better survival rates.” My response would go somewhere along these lines: Sorry for asking, but what about wound infection risk 2000+ years ago? Risk of botched circumcision reducing number of offspring to 0? And just how big would the impact on transmission rates of i.e. sexually transmitted diseases have to be to actually offset these costs (the effect size in the HIV study was quite small)? Also, lots of fatal diseases one might come up with, including quite a few sexually transmitted ones, aren’t even impacting fitness to any significant degree despite the fact that they’re deadly (which is part of why there are so many of them still around) – if you die at the age of 35, after having had 10 kids, for all practical purposes the disease doesn’t really matter all that much in the big picture. To me, the interesting question is not how a cultural adaption like circumcision might have provided the group with an evolutionary advantage, but rather why it was not so disadvantageous to the group as to go out of style completely over time). In her book she’s finding ‘evolutionary explanations’ all over the place also in places where it seems rather obvious to me that really none need even exist – these are not the only examples.

Aside from this, it’s really quite good, interesting and fun – there’s lots of good stuff as well. I’ll post more on the book later on.

Zach Weiner does it again

Link.