Saturday, November 17, 2012

Friday, November 16, 2012

On killing

This was interesting:

"There are no atheists in foxholes," the saying goes, but according to this important book there are many conscientious objectors. In World War II and before, only 15 to 20 percent of soldiers fired their weapons at enemy soldiers in view, even if their own lives were endangered. Lt. Col. (Ret.) Grossman, a military historian, psychologist and teacher at West Point, builds upon the findings of Gen. S. L. A. Marshall in Men Against Fire (1978) and confirmatory evidence from Napoleonic, Civil and other wars. "Throughout history the majority of men on the battlefield would not attempt to kill the enemy, even to save their own lives." (p. 4)

* * *

The compunction against killing occurs in close combat situations, including aerial dogfights where pilots can see each other. It does not prevail with killing at a distance by artillery or bombing from airplanes. Machine gun teams also boost the firing rate because individuals cannot simply pretend to fire or intentionally mis-aim. In aerial combat one percent of pilots made over thirty percent of kills; the majority of fighter pilots never shot down a plane, perhaps never tried to.

* * *

In the U.S. Civil War, well-trained soldiers fired over the enemy's heads, or only pretended to fire. Of 27,000 muzzle-loading muskets recovered at Gettysburg, 90 percent were loaded, almost half with multiple loads! That could not be inadvertent. Further evidence was the low kill rate in face-to-face battles. Like Marshall's assertion about World War II, "Secretly, quietly...these soldiers found themselves to be conscientious objectors who were unable to kill their fellow man." (p. 25) The secrets were well kept, in "a tangled web of individual and cultural forgetfulness, deception and lies tightly woven over thousands of years....the male ego has always justified selective memory, self-deception, and lying [about] two institutions, sex and combat." (p. 31)

* * *

About two percent of soldiers lack the killing inhibition; they score high on measures of "aggressive psychopath." Another one percent in this diagnostic category cannot endure military discipline. Grossman says the adaptable two percent serve well, return to civilian life and function as good citizens.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Moral flip flop

This article discusses an interesting study done by Lars Hall of Lund University in Sweden in which he gets people to assert their actual moral opinion, then inadvertently defend the opposite opinion some minutes later:

Researchers asked participants to complete a survey about moral issues. To do so, the participants had to flip over the first page of questions, which was displayed on a clipboard.

But the back of the clipboard had a patch of glue that caught the top layer of the questions. So when the page was flipped back over, an opposite version of the original questions was revealed but the participant's answers remained unchanged.

This meant that the participants' responses were opposite to their originally declared moral positions, the study authors said.

When the researchers discussed the participants' answers with them, they found that many people supported their answers, even though their responses were actually opposite to their original views.

The "participants often constructed coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position," suggesting "a dramatic potential for flexibility in our moral attitudes," wrote study leader Lars Hall, of Lund University, and colleagues. 

Interestingly, Hall doesn't suggest that people have actually changed their moral positions, but "Either we would have to conclude that many participants hold no real attitudes about the topics we investigate, or that standard survey scales fail to capture the complexity of the attitudes people actually hold." Still, I think it's hilarious that people can get so worked up over a moral issue, even if (apparently) they're not quite sure what they believe or why.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

More on genius

So I just noticed that the recent Scientific American issue is all about genius, including this interesting assertion about what it is like to think like a genius (and can people promote this sort of thinking in their own brains?). From the (free) summary of the (subscription only) article "Boost Creativity with Electric Brain Stimulation":


A great idea comes all of a sudden. In the depths of the mind, networks of brain cells perform a sublime symphony, and a twinkle of insight pops into consciousness. Unexpected as they are, these lightbulb moments seem impossible to orchestrate. Recent studies suggest otherwise. By freeing the mind of some of its inhibitions, we might improve creative problem solving.

The human brain constantly filters thoughts and feelings. Only a small fraction of the stimuli impressed on us by our environment ascends to the level of conscious awareness. Prior learning enforces mental shortcuts that determine which sensations are deemed worthy of our attention. Our laboratory is investigating whether we can weaken these biases and boost openness to new ideas by temporarily diminishing the neural activity in specific brain areas.

I thought this was interesting, that part of the key to being more genius is what is coming into our conscious awareness, particularly as a person who has forced awareness of many mundane decisions into my conscious thought even from a very young age. Perhaps even more the money quote with regards to the connection between this article on genius and sociopaths having unique insight:

Genius, rare as it is, must demand a qualitatively different view of the world than what most of us experience. Austrian physician Hans Asperger, whose name is associated with the eponymous condition on the autism spectrum suggested that, '"a dash of autism' might set brilliant minds apart. We have been investigating this hypothesis by using weak electric current to modulate brain activity in healthy people in our laboratory. The effects fade in an hour, preserving normal cognition. This method of brain stimulation is safe and portable - a 'creativity cap' - that anyone might use to spur creativity on demand.

Carrie Mathison from the Showtime drama Homeland anyone? Particularly on the tails of the recent article on how to raise a genius, I like this idea that genius demands a qualitatively different view of the world than what most people experience. Especially when that requirement is taken into consideration, it does seem a damn shame to kill off sociopathic babies once they can be identified as aberrant, no?

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Raising genius

I really enjoyed this article by Andrew Solomon in the NY Times Magazine, "How do you Raise a Prodigy?" I thought the parallels between raising a prodigy and raising a sociopath were compelling. He first talks about his recent research in parents that raise children with special issues:

Prodigies are able to function at an advanced adult level in some domain before age 12. “Prodigy” derives from the Latin “prodigium,” a monster that violates the natural order. These children have differences so evident as to resemble a birth defect, and it was in that context that I came to investigate them. Having spent 10 years researching a book about children whose experiences differ radically from those of their parents and the world around them, I found that stigmatized differences — having Down syndrome, autism or deafness; being a dwarf or being transgender — are often clouds with silver linings. Families grappling with these apparent problems may find profound meaning, even beauty, in them. Prodigiousness, conversely, looks from a distance like silver, but it comes with banks of clouds; genius can be as bewildering and hazardous as a disability.

He then goes on to express some of the particular difficulties in raising any child who is different than the norm, particular a child who is different from the parents themselves, and how there are no easy rules:


Children who are pushed toward success and succeed have a very different trajectory from that of children who are pushed toward success and fail. I once told Lang Lang, a prodigy par excellence and now perhaps the most famous pianist in the world, that by American standards, his father’s brutal methods — which included telling him to commit suicide, refusing any praise, browbeating him into abject submission — would count as child abuse. “If my father had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized, maybe destroyed,” Lang responded. “He could have been less extreme, and we probably would have made it to the same place; you don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a musician. But we had the same goal. So since all the pressure helped me become a world-famous star musician, which I love being, I would say that, for me, it was in the end a wonderful way to grow up.”

While it is true that some parents push their kids too hard and give them breakdowns, others fail to support a child’s passion for his own gift and deprive him of the only life that he would have enjoyed. You can err in either direction. Given that there is no consensus about how to raise ordinary children, it is not surprising that there is none about how to raise remarkable children. Like parents of children who are severely challenged, parents of exceptionally talented children are custodians of young people beyond their comprehension.

I love the Lang Lang quote. It is such a great acknowledgment that different folks require different strokes. If there is anything that I hope to achieve with the blog and getting people to think about the presence and role of sociopaths in society, it is probably to preach this gospel that we're all really different from each other in ways that we too often either ignore or pretend don't exist. There's nothing wrong with heterogeneity, in fact it is probably what keeps us so viable as the dominant species on this planet. Monster babies are born into all types of family every day. But the word monster need not mean B movie horror matinees, it could also be someone more like Lang Lang.
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