You know that I know that you I know that I have a serious David Brooks problem. So I’m going to try to a new thing: I read all of his columns and summarize each one in 80 words or less. I shut up about him the rest of the tie.
I will warn you that in some cases I have actually read the columns — which will make my summarizes inaccurate, because I’m likely to get stuck on some off-hand comments about sun chaps and primal scents but mostly I’ve just gone through the first few paragraphs and skimmed to the end.
Bobo today: empathy is worthless so we need strict conservative rules. What’s the proof? Some philosopher Bobo knows says so and sometimes the Nazis cried while they were mass murdering Jews (yes, he went there). Also too, the Kenny G of cognitive/science glibertarianism has a book about this.
Hawes
Sorry to hijack your Brooks thread, but why has BJ passed by this story. Seems right up your alley.
Big Baby DougJ
@Hawes:
I’m not quite sure what to think about it.
Cat Lady
@Hawes:
The hostage taker kinda looks like Bobo.
ETA: When it’s plausible that the Congressmen we have now would take children hostage, you’ve got a problem, America.
Jenny
I thought he was against regulation.
beltane
If empathy is worthless does that mean it is OK to imagine horrible things happening to David Brooks in some hypothetical afterlife?
May he spend all eternity locked in a windowless, yet tastefully decorated cell, and fed a diet of nothing but Champagne and pate foie gras.
jrg
Balloon Juice is now an http redirect to Sadly, No. Dandy.
What’s your problem with Pinker, specifically?
jwb
You should aim to distill Bobo to 140 characters of stupid, then you could tweet those out as as FakeBobo.
EvolutionaryDesign
@Jenny: WIN.
Also, too, empathy is the only trait that is going to save this world. It seems to me that the fundamental debate about how to live life in this country, when reduced to its elements, is empathy vs. narcissism. You can either recognize that we have good lives because of a society that functions in concert, or we reject that reality because someone was mean to us when we were 5.
/ramble
beltane
Also, the “Kenny G of cognitive science” is a definite win.
PIGL
If he’s Kenny G, who is Pat Metheny?
Dave C
Pinker may be many things, but a glibertarian he ain’t.
Jenny
This is gonna kill bobo: PPP just did a poll and President Obama leads among Floridian Jews 82-2.
Which earns him the cover story: First Jewish President
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/shana-tova-obama-dominates-fl-jewish-vote-in-poll.php?ref=fpb
Redshift
@beltane:
If we’re going for poetic justice, shouldn’t that be “force-fed foie gras”?
patrick II
That was the single most stupid thing I have ever read.
beltane
@Jenny: The voters of NY-9 are by no means representative of American Jews as a whole. It is like comparing the Pat Robertson crowd with Unitarians.
@Redshift: Thanks for catching that. It is what I meant to say.
Bill E Pilgrim
I think my aim was off with this comment I just posted so I’ll put it here.
Sly
Shorter Every Brooks Column Ever Written:
“Why can’t we all just stop being partisan, get along, and vote Republican.”
There. You can stop reading him.
Mark S.
No, I admire them because they seem to do what they do because they genuinely seem to care about their fellow humans, not because they live by some code.
jrg
After reading Brooks’ article, I’d like to note that he is a contemptible pile of greasy rhinoceros shit. Anyone who runs cover on a regular basis for the modern GOP, yet somehow manages to write:
Should be clubbed like a baby seal and shipped off to gitmo for a decade of waterboarding.
Big Baby DougJ
@Dave C:
You sure?
Big Baby DougJ
@PIGL:
H. Allen Orr, I’m proud to say.
MikeJ
@Jenny:
Which is fine until we have strict conservative rules and then complain about little old ladies being searched by TSA, why don’t they sue their judgement, blah blah blah. Judgement requires empathy, and both are despised by conservatives. That’s why we have minimum sentences that are very difficult for judges to depart from.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Jenny: Republicans are the most pro-regulation people in the country. Even the few things they actually want to deregulate like financial markets, they’d love it if they could do it by regulation, making laws against any constraints to oligarchy. What they’re against is any egalitarian regulations, authoritarian regulations, they’re all for those.
jrg
@Big Baby DougJ:
One of the top three links you cited says Pinker voted for Obama, Gore, and Kerry.
So, I’d say Dave C is on the mark, and you’re full of shit.
Helen
@beltane: Thank you. I live in NY9 and Jenny is an idiot. I fought with her throughout the election. We are not bigots or “reactionaries” as jenny called us. We just want to be real Americans and NY’ers. We want to pay our fair share (which is more than the average American; everyone in NY subsidises the USA) and move on with our lives.
Big Baby DougJ
@jrg:
I interpret glibertarian quite broadly. I think lots of glibertarians probably voted for those guys. You think Matt Welch votes Republican?
If you are familiar with his book The Blank Slate, you will agree that Pinker is more or less a glibertarian.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Big Baby DougJ: I don’t think Kenny G is right. Kenny is dismissed as a complete hack by any serious jazz player, but Pinker has done some solid work, and he’s certainly fully literate in the traditions of his field, unlike G.
I’d just hate to see “like Kenny G” reduced to just meaning “too popular” when there’s so much more to it.
jrg
I’ve read The Blank Slate. The notion that all people are born with the same cognitive potential is absurd. Saying that does not make him a glibertarian. It makes him a realist.
Big Baby DougJ
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Because of his hair! He isn’t dismissed at all, he’s a heavy hitter for sure.
Big Baby DougJ
@jrg:
I
would probablymight consider you to be a glibertarian. I consider anyone who would blithely use the phrase “cognitive potential” to be a glibertarian, in fact.What does “cognitive potential” even mean? What kind of cognition?
EDIT: Though if you mean by “not the same”, merely “different”, then I take it back. But if you think there’s some linear ranking of “cognitive potential”, then yeah.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Big Baby DougJ: Ah, missed that one. Got it.
jrg
Spatial, linguistic, emotional intelligence… Whatever it is, or however you define it, some people have a knack for certain things. Snooki is not a physicist, for example. No matter how much time she spends studying astrophysics, she’s never going to turn into Steven Hawking.
Big Baby DougJ
@jrg:
What if Stephen Hawking had been born into a lower middle-class Italian-American New Jersey family? Then what? (Just kidding, I don’t disagree, as long as a sufficiently broad view of cognition is allowed for in the general discussion.)
jrg
@Big Baby DougJ:
It’s been a few years since I read it, but I do recall him stating something like… All things being equal, it’s easier to screw someone up by giving them a bad environment than it is to make someone successful (monetarily or otherwise) by giving them a good environment. He does not discount nurture entirely. He just believes that nature holds more sway, IIRC.
Big Baby DougJ
@jrg:
I find some of his arguments to be glibertarianesque. This exchange is interesting.
I am very unpersuaded by evolutionary psychology in general, though.
gocart mozart
@Big Baby DougJ:
I don’t understand. What makes it libertarian. Certainly, many environmental factors effect brain development but also certainly some factors are genetic.
Redshift
@Mark S.:
Fixed that for him. Anyone whose obligation to an abstract code “overshadows” their fellow-feeling rather than serving or channeling it is not someone I will ever admire.
Big Baby DougJ
@gocart mozart:
If you read between the lines, the general anti-Enlightenment project (I am not claiming that Pinker is fully part of this project) is to (a) downgrade the importance of rational thought (obviously, Pinker isn’t trying to do this but Bobo is) in order to make religion and “traditional values” more important and (b) say “oh, who knows how people are born, who is to say the government shouldn’t just let people starve” etc.
eemom
Sorry DougJ, but if yer gonna admit you have a Bobo problem, this “80 words or less and shut up the rest of the time” thing ain’t gonna cut it. That’s no different from “I’m gonna drink a fifth of Jack Daniels and be sober the rest of the time.”
Seek help. When you’re ready.
srv
Doug,
Have you ever thought that Bobo exists just to troll you?
BruceFromOhio
OK, I only count 49 actual words about the column, and that’s if you count the “G” in Kenny G as a word. Where’s the other 31 words?
And you’re up against some tough competition, because no one does Shorter David Brooks like that Shakira’s-ass-lovin’ dog guy from San D.
eemom called it, you’re better off knocking back some Jack, fuck sobriety.
ETA: There is … no … Sanctuary!
Spaghetti Lee
I’m picturing some sort of PSA coming out of this.
“My dad has a David Brooks problem, and it’s tearing our family apart.” “My wife has a David Brooks Problem, and I didn’t talk to her until it was too late.” “If you or a loved one has a David Brooks problem, there is help. Call the Brooks Addiction Hotline at 1-800-555-6789.”
Spaghetti Lee
@BruceFromOhio:
And Drifty, and Doghouse, and the Sadlies…honestly, I’ve never been quite sure why so much ink, sweat, and tears get spilled over such a silly little man.
gex
@EvolutionaryDesign: I was reading a book about narcissistic family environments (where the adults needs are central and the kids serve those needs). I found it interesting that the psychologist who researched and wrote that book noted that those children often found a sense of belonging and feeling okay about themselves as adults by becoming very nationalistic or very religious.
ETA: A rough estimate of our hyper-nationalism and hyper-religiosity indicate narcissism is winning big time.
Sly
@gocart mozart:
Because the precise role genetics plays in intelligence is a ceaselessly complex subject, making “cognitive potential” an incredibly loaded phrase. For one thing, the heritable factors express themselves with differing degrees of “force” at particular phases of brain development; they start out having very little importance and become more expressive when a person reaches adulthood. So “potential” has less meaning when you’re looking at an infant compared to, say, a twenty five year old man or woman.
Big Baby DougJ
@eemom:
What’s wrong with that?
BruceFromOhio
@Spaghetti Lee: Silly little man has a big motherfucking megaphone that gets reprinted on more editorial pages than you or me. And the brutally insipid shit that gets spewed from said megaphone, it has this mysterious power to sway opinion, provide cover for other brutally insipid shit spewers, all treated as raw material in the fabrication of lethal farce disguised as political commentary. Silly? Yes. Destructive? Alas.
All that and a fucking paycheck, too.
And the few times I’ve managed to listen to him speak on the tube, I cannot shake that impression that the smarmy little cocksucker KNOWS he’s full of fucking shit, and digs it.
See? The little prick even got me on a roll, and I don’t even work here.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Spaghetti Lee: “At first it was just the quotes from people making fun of him on blogs, then I started following the links and reading him directly, the occasional entire column… before I knew it I was mainlining the Newshour directly from the cable…. it’s the exasperation, the feeling that you just want to shake him and explain, it’s funny, but you start to crave it after a while. Then, some of the guys started passing around some salad…”
Bill E Pilgrim
@Sly: Well said.
I daresay that someone like Stephen Pinker would have a hard time agreeing with the idea that you can say with any accuracy that so and so could or couldn’t have been a physicist based on what she’s like as an adult.
Spaghetti Lee
@BruceFromOhio:
it has this mysterious power to sway opinion
See, this is what I’ve always wondered. The right-wing didn’t get the way they were from reading David Brooks every day. They got that way from Fox News, from right-wing chain e-mail culture, from talk radio, from televangelists and megachurches, etc. The teabaggers all think Brooks is part of the liberal media, if they think about him at all. I’ve always thought that more energy should be devoted to attacking that part of wingnuttia. Brooks doesn’t have a vested interest in conservative ideology, he has a vested interest in his image as Mr. Centrist. If the far right crumbles, I think the squishy center-right won’t try to build it back up. Why would they? They’re wealthy careerists, not true-believing ideologues.
Mnemosyne
@jrg:
Did he write this before or after the SC gave the presidency to George W. Bush?
mclaren
Parenthetically, three researchers in Italy have now produced mathematical proof that organizations would become significantly more efficient if they promoted people at random.
The implications for presidential elections, multinational corporations, and of course the op-ed pages of the New York Times seem profound.
Arxiv paper here: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” by Allessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Garofolo, 29 October 2009.
Spaghetti Lee
@BruceFromOhio:
@BruceFromOhio:
it has this mysterious power to sway opinion
See, this is what I’ve always wondered. The right-wing didn’t get the way they were from reading David Brooks every day. They got that way from Fox News, from right-wing chain e-mail culture, from talk radio, from televangelists and megachurches, etc. The teabaggers all think Brooks is part of the liberal media, if they think about him at all. I’ve always thought that more energy should be devoted to attacking that part of wingnuttia. Brooks doesn’t have a vested interest in conservative ideology, he has a vested interest in his image as Mr. Centrist. If the far right crumbles, I think the squishy center-right won’t try to build it back up. Why would they? They’re wealthy careerists, not true-believing ideologues.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Spaghetti Lee: Barack Obama is a fan and avid consumer of David Brooks. There’s the problem. It’s moderately liberal Democrats who are influenced or have their worst instincts propped up and their consciences soothed and etc by people like Brooks, right wingers reading him or not is not where the action is.
Brooks is also more and more unabashedly extreme right-wing as you go back through his stuff, over years I mean. He got to where he is by a combination of the NYT wanting to seen as “balanced” by hiring conservatives and Brooks moderating himself to seem like a Nice Polite Republican.
Mark S.
In regards to Pinker, I tried reading How The Mind Works but there was way too much evo psych bullshit for me. The arguments for the computational theory of the mind bored me to death.
The Spy Who Loved Me
Was Doug drunk when he wrote this? Perhaps did it with one hand tied behind his back? Had his pet monkey type it as he dictated the content? WTF?
MikeJ
@The Spy Who Loved Me:
Why would this post be different from any others?
Jebediah
@Spaghetti Lee:
I think that is why he is so destructive. Non-political junkies who think he is the Mr Centrist he claims to be might not recognize his pablum as the Republican crap that it is, and be fooled by his “affable,” “reasonable” mien.
He needs to be tied to a tree and punched into powder.
Suffern ACE
Well, I do have to agree with Brooks. There is a limit to empathy. For instance, despite all my training in empathy producing techniques, I can’t imagine at all what it would be like to imagine that there is a problem that too much focus on empathy. It does not even make my own top 100 list of things that need to be addressed. Can’t imagine the circumstances that would even put it in the top 40.
Short response: Brooks, the reason we don’t like the institutions isn’t because of an outbreak of moral individualism or a crisis of empathy governing human interactions. It’s because people like you are at the top of those institutions. With a little introspection and self-reflection, you’ll realize how much you suck, work at not sucking, and maybe other people like you will do the same. Then we’ll get back to discussing the rules.
Nancy Irving
“the Kenny G of cognitive/science glibertarianism” (Pinker) – brilliant!
Joey Maloney
@Redshift:
I’ll go for “force-fed grain until his own liver swells up and then it’s torn out by an eagle and then force-fed to him. Every day, like Prometheus.”
I’m sure he’d appreciate the Classical allusion.
Jenny
@Bill E Pilgrim:
“I, you know, I don’t spend a lot of time reading columns.” ~ President Obama, July 21, 2009.
Suffern ACE
@Jebediah: Someday, those radical centrists are gonna realize that Brooks and Palin are really of the same cloth and take their movement back from the loons like Brooks who’ve driven it to the ground. In measured steps, of course.
JGabriel
The NY Times is reporting that the US is going to have a garage sale to raise some cash*:
Because no one with terrorist ambitions would buy an island chock full of leftovers and remains from experiments with diseased animals.
Jeepers.
(* Link to NYT should work for anyone. Apparently you can structure an NYT link to be publicly available by adding ?_r=1 at the end of the link, directly after the .html extension.)
.
MikeJ
@JGabriel: That’s the place they offered to send Hannibal Lector, isn’t it?
Suffern ACE
@JGabriel: Sounds like a good place for Cuba to put its Iranian missiles and Hezbollah shock troops.
cthulhu
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Beyond that, they’re all for “regulation manipulation” whereby favored companies are given a step up, often the Goliath vs. the David.
I’ve always said that one of the biggest flaws in free market absolutism is that eventually the winners get the option of making the market less free to their benefit. And of course they WILL do this because because that fits perfectly well within the amoral capitalistic model.
Pose this paradox to a free market type and you’ll get plenty of hemming and hawing but never an adequate solution.
Suffern ACE
@mclaren: Hmmmm. I am intrigued by the simulation in which the best and worst performers are promoted. Sucks to be in the middle, but then it usually does.
Martin
@JGabriel:
Can’t we just sell South Carolina instead? It has a GDP of $164B and generates north of $20B annually in federal revenue, which of course the new owner would get to keep. We’d need to take a few things out of there – I’m thinking Fort Jackson and Parris Island would need to be cleared out some, but I think everyone would be best off if all of the white people were required to stay there to, you know, keep the economy running, and we’ll take all of the brown people that wish to leave.
I’d think we could get a pretty penny for it, and honestly, I think it’s a win-win.
Bago
Kirkegaard would hate anonymous, he said on a blog.
EvolutionaryDesign
@gex: Yeah, all of my feelings are purely gut-related on this issue (which probably isn’t helping things), but it’s nice to see some research dedicated to the subject.
Martin
@mclaren:
Yeah, working in a large bureaucratic institution, I don’t find that even remotely surprising.
But the conclusion that it would have implications on elections seems misguided. The GOP seems quite determined to prove that any random dipshit is qualified to hold office – and that’s not working out very well.
Martin
OOH! Red tide is back!
We had one 2 years ago that was so bright you could read by it. Very cool swimming in the middle of the night when every movement makes the water glow.
Anne Laurie
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Sweet! Txt-spl ‘fr’ & ‘u’ and (assuming I’ve counted correctly) you can even add ‘LOL!’ and keep it under 140 characters. Maybe you should register as #FakeBoboBrooks…
Anne Laurie
@jrg:
The one article I remember reading about Snooki — in the NYTimes, IIRC — her dad said they’d adopted her from Colombia as a toddler. He also hinted, rather broadly, that it wasn’t just her height that had been stunted by early malnutrition. So, on the nature-v-nurture scale, you may wanna field-test that analogy further before taking it beyond late-night blog debates.
Martin
Ugh. This is feeling truly hopeless. I’m on my 4th consecutive 16 hour workday and I’m falling rapidly behind in spite of it. I need to hack nearly half a million dollars out of a budget that’s already been cut to the bone. I used up all of my clever solutions last year and I’m flat out of ideas to get through this. I let people go I wasn’t sure I could afford to let go, and now I’m facing letting go even more people that I KNOW I can’t afford to let go. I was afraid that we were eating our seed corn last year, and now I have to take a huge chunk out of even that. I actually do have more clever solutions to fix the long-term budget, but as you’d expect, I need money in the short term to do them – and I don’t have it.
I’ve never felt like giving up before, but I really do now.
drunken hausfrau
Yeah… so all that Christian stuff is just baloney. What code would Jesus follow? CUz he was all about the authority and rules and just hated empathy.
Rethuglicans. Can’t live with them, can’t seem to kill them either.
Lysana
Pardon the OTness, but Mnemosyne was wondering about Anwar al-Awlaki in a dying thread. Seems we don’t have him to kick around anymore.
John S.
@Martin:
That sucks man, but look on the bright side: At least you have a budget to cut. I’m the head of the Marketing department for a company on track to make $30 million this year (which made $26 million last year), and I have NO budget. My staff has long since been let go, leaving me an island of one, and I’m expected to successfully market our services across 18 locations in 8 major metro markets without spending a dime. And yesterday, I was taken to task for our website not ranking highly on Google against major competitors who spend millions in online marketing.
In other words, it could always be worse.
John S.
@Lysana:
That’s certainly news, except for a few minor wrinkles like:
Along with the fact that we don’t know WHO actually killed him (nevermind the fact that he may not actually be dead), I don’t think we can take the text messages of unnamed Yemeni defense officials as gospel truth. Especially given the current conditions in Yemen.
It’s worth keeping an eye on as the story develops, but I think you’re being a little premature in whatever conclusions you are drawing.
Ash Can
@Jenny:
I can totally see him as into bondage, though.
@Helen: Then why do “you” elect anti-gay-marriage Israel-Firsters?
amk
another aq terrist gone.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/world-middle-east-15121879
cue poutrage diaries at gos, fdl, salon and geegee frothing in the mouth
Ash Can
@amk: Al Jazeera is reporting it as well, albeit with caveats.
Ian
@jrg:
On a very theoretical note I would disagree with you. As best as we can tell most babies are in fact relatively equal. Some are (quite unfortunately,I mean no offense) born with mental deficient problems. Some are born with hereditary diseases. But my understanding is most are born with relatively similar minds capable of similar levels of understanding. To come about to BOBO’s (or Bachmans, of Perry’s) requires a considerable failure of the parents. The parents must have done a terrible job of things like communicating and teaching to their child, teaching valuable skills like empathy and understanding, or simply a lack of verbal communication with an underdeveloped child.
Hard to tell what could create a psychopath like BoBo. All 3?
Cermet
Why would any rational person pay the NYT to read such asswipes like bobo and the tumor brained shit eating warmonger just so the NYT can champion a false war that murdered thousands of amerikan kids and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s? Yes, they have posted numerous times how wrong they were for pushing that bloody strife upon us that has done more to ruin our economy than anything but what the banks along with the parasitic wallstreet criminals did.
BruceFromOhio
@Bill E Pilgrim:
WE HAVE A WINNER (…dingdingdingdingdingding…)
And, thank the blessed lands of Gaia, we now have Charles Pierce to read as the universe attempts to provide balance to itself.
harlana
@Cermet:
kind of amazing that anyone still listens to them, innit?
WereBear
I get it. Republicans are sick of being accused of having no empathy. They can’t fight it because, well, they don’t. So they attack empathy itself.
Why rely on Mother Love, after all? Just make it illegal to beat Junior to death… problem solved!
Lee Hartmann
All the evidence suggests that David Brooks does not know the meaning of the word “empathy”.
Chinn Romney
Hmmmm, needs some driftglass style photoshop to spruce up this new feature.
Anya
@Helen: I guess that’s why it was so easy to whipp the “real Americans and NY’ers” of NY-09 into a frenzy by a rabid islamophobe and an anti-gay-marriage loon against the Israel hating anti-colonial Kenyan Muslim.
dww44
@Spaghetti Lee: I agree. I have perfectly nice older relatives in rural areas who sit in front of Fox News all day or have talk radio on. In other days these were perfectly rational and reasonable folks, but these days they can believe that Obama’s the reason they’ve not gotten a Social Security cost-of-living increase.
DanielX
@Jebediah: By comparison with Bloody Bill Kristol (any war will do, so long as he doesn’t have fight in it), Brooks appears to be relatively liberal. Then again, who wouldn’t? Brooks’ long established record of mendacious bullshit is clear enough, as noted by numerous commentators. He’s no different from Andrew Sullivan, David Frum or other pundits who have just recently noticed that their beloved Party has been taken over by lunatics, starting about thirty years ago – except that he can’t take that stand and stick to it. He is not a stupid man. Brooks says what he says because he gets paid a lot of money for doing so and because if he admitted, a la John Cole, that wingnuts are authoritarian idiots and that he’d been wrong about a lot of things for a lot of years, he wouldn’t get paid a lot of money. There’s no great mystery here, spewing false equivalency horseshit is his rice bowl. As you may have noticed, there aren’t all that many gigs around where you get paid what he does for doing what he does.
But hey, boys and girls, give it up for David Brooks! By comparison with Ross Douthat, he looks pretty good. I mean, he hasn’t used some of the most read editorial space in the media world to say that stopping the execution of innocent men would cast doubt on the criminal justice system, so we have to go on executing innocent men. I mean, I read that one and thought “5.5, 6, 7, 5.5 and hey, 8.5 from the East German judge for THAT piece of idiocy!”
Brooks, Douthat and all their ilk are just doing what they do because they get extremely well paid for it, and never mind the lies, hypocrisy and intellectual inconsistency. You can rationalize an awful lot if you get paid enough to own a vacation home and fly to Paris for the weekend. That’s the way of the world, as any of our Randian overlords will be happy to tell you. And they do serve a function by providing an awful lot of fodder for the blogging world. If Driftglass and others (including writers on this blog) were paid what they’re worth for imaginative vitriol (which I agree with), THEY would be vacationing in Paris and be known as latter day H.L. Menckens. Unfortunately, after all these years of being bombarded with paid propaganda most of our fellow citizens have lost the capacity for critical thinking, assuming they had it to begin with. I mean, people who take Rush Limbaugh seriously? He’s a seriously overweight doper, for chrissakes! In a sane world people wouldn’t take him any more seriously than I would take the political opinions of a living Jerry Garcia, and I liked Jerry’s music a lot better than anything I’ve ever heard out of Rush Limbaugh. But again, as you may have noticed, we don’t live in a sane world.
YellowDog
Kenny G. What an apt comparison. Kenny G has the record for holding one note continuously–45 minutes and 47 seconds. The technique is exceptional; the substance not so much.
Samara Morgan
WTF?
Dr. Pinker? you are going to turn on our allies in some sort of fit of pique over over your and Coles failed attempts to groom a BJ glibertarian rent boi?
Steven Pinker is no glibertarian Kenny G.
read this.
The Stupidity of Dignity.
I suspect you have never read any of Pinker’s work.
Samara Morgan
and this is for Cole. Do you know what Neal Stephenson has been doing since Anathem?
Playing Warcrack.
I wish i’d been in his guild, lol.
This is a great book, evolutionary economics and game theory made accessible to the masses in a ripping techno thriller.
it reads like a screen play.
I heart Stephenson so much.
Samara Morgan
@EvolutionaryDesign: dude, none of these
cudlips‘slines** are interested in reciprocal altruism or the evo theory of games. DougJ hasn’t read Pinker. Bobo just cherry picks crap that he can warp to support his position. Neither DougJ or Bobo will acknowledge red/blue genetics– the juicitariat believes IQ is plastic, LOL!**im going to use Anathem ‘slines in honor of REAMDE.
its an abbreviation of “baselines”….the same thing as Morgan’s cudlips.
Samara Morgan
@YellowDog: this is of a piece with the BJ principle of rejection of Charles Murray’s book. They believe IQ is plastic.
/sneer
Of course DougJ rejects Pinker and the evolutionary biology guys– they are destructing his tribal shibboleth.
:)
John Weiss
Empathy is the reason that humans have come to this point.
Brooks is an idiot. I for one don’t pay attention to idiots. Except me.
RSA
@mclaren:
Except that there’s no hint of validation in the paper. I’m not aware of work that shows the Peter Principle is a good predictor of what happens in practice, though of course there are lots of anecdotes. Here we have something even fluffier: The researchers develop a new, very simple model of organizations that’s not based on any other work; they develop a new way to evaluate the efficiency of organizations, again just assuming that it seems reasonable; they simulate a counterfactual and say, “Look what would happen.” It’s hard to see the point.
WereBear
Rather, our world has been given to the insane.
Dissing empathy? Saying the problem with the unemployed is that they are staying alive on their unemployment insurance? Packing guns to political meetings and in bars for the luvaholy?
frapalinger
I sincerely believe that Bobo believes the Jews brought it all on themselves for demanding equality and dabbling in radical politics. He also just hates hippies because of his own sexual repression.
someofparts
Doesn’t Driftglass already do this?
jrg
@Anne Laurie:
OK. So people naturally vary widely in every non-discreet attribute (meaning attributes other than the number of toes, heads, etc) we collectively display. People have different heights, weights, eye color, hair color, etc, etc, etc. All of these attributes have a heavily genetic component. Except for intelligence… Because suggesting that makes people uncomfortable. How very scientific.
Samara Morgan
@jrg:
no, you just cant discuss intelligence at balloon-juice without being called a racist.
Because a 16-yr-old book by a political “scientist” has become a tribal shibboleth.
Juicers believe IQ is infinitely plastic, except for the ones that deny IQ exists at all as a metric for cognitive ability.
You relly can’t expect anything else from ‘slines.
:)
Sly
@Samara Morgan:
I wonder if people who engage in strawmans do so because they inherited that stupidity from their parents or if it was due to some kind of environmental factor. Like, say, staying in an Evo Psyche class so long that their brain suffers from anoxia.
Intelligence is to a very large extent plastic. You will have a harder time denying this than denying than anyone pushing the claim that it is completely plastic. The heritable factors of intelligence are polygenic and only become heavily expressive after a person’s brain fully develops. This is not to say that cognition is a blank slate. It’s more like a lump of clay that is continuously molded as it hardens inside the kiln.
Oh, and…
Pinker is not an evolutionary biologist.
Anne Laurie
@jrg:
Yes, except the “expression” of some of those factors, like height and weight, are strongly influenced by prenatal & postnatal events. (Hell, there’s new research suggesting an individual’s adult propensity to obesity is affected by their grandparents’ diet during puberty.) It’s pretty clear that the form of ‘intelligence’ measured by IQ tests is one of those very-influencible attributes, since performance on IQ tests can be changed so dramatically. Therefore, pretending that “IQ” is a fixed factor like eye color is intellectually dishonest, and the people pretending that this “IQ” can be measured with sufficient rigor to use it as a marker for socioeconomic / educational sorting are liars. Some of them are grifters, some of them are just deluded, and many of them — like David Brooks — are using their delusions to buttress their highly profitable careers.
Sly
@Anne Laurie:
Which is something that we’ve known since the 1920s, when the U.S. Army tried to do it and failed miserably, thank you very much.
jrg
@Anne Laurie:
I’m not suggesting that IQ is a good measure of overall intelligence, nor am I suggesting that there is a single type of intelligence, nor am I suggesting that someone who’s not genetically prone to be obese will not become so if they live on a 5,000 calorie a day diet of milkshakes and fried chicken.
I’m not defending David Brooks, either.
I’m simply suggesting that different people have different aptitudes, and different levels of potential, in different fields, depending on those aptitudes.
Anne Laurie
@jrg: Otherwise known as the “No True Scotsman” argument. If you have to keep walking back your argument every time someone raises an objection, you’re not arguing fact, you’re arguing faith. I’ve had lots of high-IQ genetic determinists tell me that being a devout animist is “silly”, but at least my faith doesn’t require me to defend David Brooks in a public forum!
jrg
@Anne Laurie:
I’m not walking anything back, and I’m not going to argue with someone who hasn’t bothered to read what I already wrote upthread.