Security & Stuff

Edward Lemay, assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire and his colleagues found that people who had heightened feelings of interpersonal security — a sense of being loved and accepted by others — placed a lower monetary value on their possessions than people who did not.

I am becoming more and more anti-stuff. I have always been anti-shopping but some of that is simply not liking the process of looking, finding, sometimes trying on and then purchasing, followed by being told I could have gotten it cheaper, larger, greener or with more power. Anti-stuff is both anti-consumerism and anti-clutter. I find the weight of ownership to be a burden. The process also requires that I labor to produce capital to expend on the objects I find objectionable. Seems like an obvious wicked circle, Dante comes to mind.


On the other hand, I don't find that being loved or accepted has much to do with my meager ways. I just don't like stuff. In fact, often upon entering into a loving, accepting relationship the event is inaugurated with a flurry of accumulation. New furniture, new clothes, new this, new that. OK some of the this and thats are fun, you know one of those things with the whatchamacallit and the thingamabob attachment. But other than that - no more stuff!


The Lemay study actually asked people to put a monetary value on their possessions. So it really isn't that being accepted and loved will make you purchase and consume less, but rather that you value the stuff at a lower price point. Hoarders, in particular, value their piles of items as much as five times more than those who are secure, loved and accepted.


However, if love and acceptance makes anyone less attached to their possessions dollar-wise or otherwise and if being less attached means accumulating fewer things - well then I am all for it! I love you, I accept you. Let's celebrate by not going to the mall.
--
Art: the BuyMoreMandala made of plastic shopping bags

Social Scientist Sees Bias Within

A very interesting NYTimes article from a couple of months back reported on potential liberal bias in social science research. It seems that the organization - The Society for Personality and Social Psychology is made up of over 80% liberals. The article touches on the generalized 'fact' that academia in general is more liberal than the society as a whole. What makes this more interesting is that the SPSP focuses research on areas of gender, racial, ethnic and other forms of social prejudice but when it comes close to home, the article suggests, the professors are unable to see their own bias - liberalism.

The counter arguments ("80% of cops are conservative," "conservatives are X or liberals are Y") play out quite effectively in the comments section attached to the article. And while I do recommend both the article and the follow-up debate, I am more interested in what the article implies about the liberal mindset. 

You see Barack Obama has announced his intentions to seek a second term and my liberal friends are beginning to line up in one of two muttering masses of thought.  

Pro-Obama - "He remains the bright shining light of hope." "Have you listened to the Tea Party!" "Of the two choices..."

Not-So-Much-Anymore - "He hasn't kept any of the promises I heard in '08." "What about Gitmo?" "How can our guy bomb Libya and keep us in Iraq and Afghanistan.."

So yes, this is the opening salvo of my 2012 advocacy of third party candidates but with a twist. It has become more and more apparent to me that liberals including many of my liberal friends are engaged in really weak-willed self delusion. Conservatives don't listen to your old worn arguments, they reject them as 'heard it all before.' Conservatives know what they believe and they often know they are right in those beliefs. Liberals or Progressives, on the other hand, tend to hang out with the antiquated notion that every position deserves equal time and contemplation again and again and again. Stop! Stand up for what you belief. Be willing to say that others are wrong, entitled to their opinion yes, but wrong is still wrong.

There is a huge difference between being co-opted by local prejudice of your self-selected tribe and simply but vocally declaring that some truths are self-evident and not subject to interpretation or political spin. Some truths are etched in stone and conscious, do you know which of your beliefs rise to that level of truth? And perhaps even more importantly to a civil debate, which of your beliefs are not actually up to the label of truth and therefore are capable of compromise.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis*

I must begin this post with an apology to my academic friends, in particular to the linguists in that group. I will be doing a popularized take on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis today, which will not be up to the standards of rigor expected in the ivy covered walls. I do this because I have experienced two real world examples of this linguist theory in my day-to-day wanderings over the past couple of months; each time in the unspoken regions of my mind I was thinking - Benjamin Lee Whorf.

First some background. Today the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is generally referred to as Linguistic Relativity. The theory states very simply that the differences in languages leads to differences in both human experience and thought. Meaning that those speaking (and thinking in) very different languages actually perceive the world differently. Or stated another way, language determines your worldview. That may seem intuitively obvious but I guarantee you that is only because you heard this theory first. Until very recently the predominate linguistic view on this issue was that thought precedes language and at the deepest level all humans think alike.

Perhaps an illustration is in order. Take the statement: John broke the window. Now in english there is an agent of the breakage, that would be John. But in some linguistic cultures agents are not part of the language. Ask a member of that culture about the sentence and they are likely to report something like: the window broke. Who did it is not relevant. Wait you say, so in those cultures John is not responsible? Who's going to pay to fix the window? Well it can be a lot more subtle than that.

Try this one - The orange and blue polar bear. You see him up there at the top, right? You know he is not really orange and blue, it's the light. But what if I told you that bears like that feed at low light; in the fall and spring there are long periods of low sun creating a lot of orange light and bluish shadows. So the statement - orange and blue bear refers not only to the colors but to the observable fact that at those times of day or night the bear might well be hunting for food and therefore more dangerous to cross paths with.

A white bear is a nuisance, a orange-blue bear can kill you. Same bear, different outcome. Good to know the local language and the worldview it conveys.

Yes, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity is a lot more complex than what I have explained. Believe me I know; I had a good friend who was all but obsessed with Whorf for many years and we all heard endless permutations and applications of Whorfian thought.

Now to the incident that prompted this rumination on Mr. Sapir and Mr. Whorf. I was in the Golden Bough bookstore in Mt. Shasta doing some lazy browsing. The staff person and a customer, who was obviously a friend were having a discussion about angels. It was clear to me that they were not going to resolve their differences because despite the fact that they were indeed both speaking english, they did not share a common worldview. I also noticed that their differing takes on reality were completely influenced by how they derived meaning from their own words. As I said they did not share a language in the sense that they assigned the same meaning to the words they were using.

At one point, perhaps 15 minutes into the debate, the staffer was shelving some books which brought him into my aisle and he said:

"What do you think, are there angels or not?"

I gave my dura mater a yawning flex and replied:

"Well I am currently working on a novel in which one of the main characters is an angel."

"So you believe angels are real," said the customer.

"Another one," grumbled the staffer.

"Actually I don't think angels are real, but neither do you," I said, directing my answer at the customer.

"Certainly I do," she protested.

"Well then why do you say believe in angels? Why is it a matter of faith and not fact?"

I never did get to tell them that the reason they would never agree was because they were not speaking the same language and did not share a worldview. It sounded like they were having a discussion but their beliefs did not encompass the possibility of the other person being right.

By the way, just in case the other two people from the other discussion that got me thinking about Sapir and Whorf, just in case they are reading this. There was a correct answer to the question you were debating. It was southwest. And I know one of you thinks they said that, so you should have won the argument. But when you stand on a hilltop and point due north and say "southwest" you can't be completely right; either your finger or your voice is mistaken. But then the entire discussion was about the meaning of direction and you two will never agreed on that. So much linguistic relativity.

Did you get lost just a bit in that last paragraph? Was it the obtuse nature of my writing or was it linguistic relativity?

A Higher Education

I pose a simple question: What percentage of the population of the United States hold a college degree? The answer will appear below the cyber-fold. I must admit I was surprised by the number. I assume that lots of folks who hold a degree estimate too high, I did a quick unscientific survey of a small group of individuals and found that those who do not have a degree give a slightly lower number but still aim a bit too high.

So you have a clue, your guess is probably too high, so knock off 5% maybe 10% if you have a masters or a doctorate, we know those advanced degrees really schew your perception of reality.

So what was your guess? The answer is that as of 2009, twenty-seven and one-half percent of the adult population holds a college degree.

Here is a very cool interactive map from the Chronicle of Higher Education that shows where these over educated people live. It's a county by county breakdown and here is the really cool part, you can track back from 2009 to 1940. You thought the college numbers were higher today, only 4.6% of the country were college educated in 1940. When I got my B.A. in 1969 the overall number had just reached 10%.

The map also has breakouts by gender, ethnicity and income. Before you leave the map, be sure to set it for 2009 and click the Asian button.

Bacon, Baklava and Barium

You know the story of the blind but wise persons put into a room and asked to describe the animal in the room with them using only touch to identify the beast. One person touches the elephant's trunk and another the tusk, the tail, the ears etc. We end up with a lot of very different descriptions of the elephant, none of which resemble the actual creature. There are several morals to that tale about insufficient information, anecdotal evidence, knowledge versus description, getting the whole picture, turning water into wine and not cutting babies in half to satisfy competing parents. Teaching parables have been used since dolphins could first communicate.


Imagine this twist in the tale, the wise persons are not blind, they are all put in front of a huge salt water coral reef tank in one of the wonderful aquariums we have built around the world. Their task: describe one of the tropical creatures they see. Of course you would expect to get a wide range of reports with all of the brightly coloured sea life on display. But then I tell you that at least one of the reports came from a man wearing those blu-blocker sunglasses, another from a women who turned her back to the aquarium and described only what she heard murmured by others and finally, one of the reports came from a man paid to describe only the yellow and white, heavily spined pufferfish. What distorted moral would you draw from this tale?


An article this month in The Atlantic suggests that this little fish story is the moral equivalent of medical research today. Lies, Damned Lies and Medical Statistics reports via meta-research that the data being given to doctors and patients about diet, exercise and in particular pharmaceuticals is terrible flawed and potentially bought and paid for by the drug manufacturers.


Here some excerpts:


Can any medical-research studies be trusted?


That question has been central to Ioannidis's career. He's what's known as a meta-researcher, and he's become one of the world's foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies--conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain--is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field's top journals, where it is heavily cited; and his is a big draw at conference. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else's work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the filed of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change--or even to publicly admitting there is a problem.


No here comes the scary part--Dr. Ioannidis is not being scapegoating or attacked, nearly everyone segment of the medical research community agrees with his findings, but they are not sure they should tell--us!


The question of whether the problems with medical research should be broadcast to the public is a sticky one in the meta-research community. Already feeling that they're are fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren't eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do--not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding.


I strongly recommend reading the entire article. After I finished it I thought about the several medical newsletters I regularly read online and wondered how much of that information is flawed. Never mind, how much has changed, even completely reversed the health advice we received in the recent past. I thought I would offer up some of my favor current bits of medical wisdom with Dr. Ioannisdis' caveat that it is likely to be flawed, wrong or bought and paid for.


*Hair loss before age 30 is associated with a lower risk of prostate cancer later in life, according to a new study that contradicts some earlier research.


*A new study shows foods high in fat and refined sugar can create a cocaine-like addiction that leads to obesity. Persons so addicted should be treated for their addiction before attempting to address the weight issues.


*That daily baby aspirin for heart health, you know the one that suddenly became a full 325 mg tablet a couple of years ago. Well now it may not be such a good idea, particularly if you have a predisposition to stomach bleeds.


*Water--yes water! It seems those eight glasses of water a day are not such a universally good idea. Not only are there kidney issues for some individuals but when you drink the water can have an absorption/dilution effect on many medications including your Flintstone vitamins.


*Sex remains a good outlet for nearly every one. For the very few who might have serious life threatening consequences -- you got a better way to go?


**Yes I know that's a rhinoceros not an elephant, but a cool sculpture none the less.

---
photo/sculpture: wirelady.com

Tools or Words?

I tend to pay attention to synchronicity, which is to say that when recurring images or thoughts, phrases, songs, personages, situations, nouns, verbs, physical traits or other ephemera repeat themselves within range of my seven senses, I take note. Lately, there seems to be a debate, indeed a reengagement of a conversation about what makes homo sapien the dominant species on planet earth.

The two sides are quite simply: language or tools. Now obviously the answer is -- both! But that does not settle the argument, at least not in the academic circles of this circular universe. Today I encountered the following logic: when archeologists search for meaning in ancient human settlements besides human remains (bones) we typically look at cultural artifacts. Artifacts being the stuff we made. We made this stuff with tools, which are considered a higher order of artifact because they are created in order to create other things. With the exception of some primates and a few birds, we have no observable evidence of other species using tools and obsoletely none of any other animal creating a Sears catalog to desseminate their tools.

Now the language folks would point out that an even higher order of artifact is the written word in the form of books, scrolls, tablets, cave paintings and even remnants in oral traditions. I would add that when one of our historic or pre-historic ancestors innovated and build a better hammer or mousetrap; the culture was more likely to be transformed or paradigm shifted when the caveguy next door could come over and say: "How'd ya do dat?"

I brought this up because in a skype conversation last night, one of my younger but wiser friends offered that language itself is an artifact but whether it is higher or lower order is really irrelevant particularly because the discussion is taking place in language, which makes words both mundane and sacred to us and perhaps the debate ---- well . . . academic?