The rise of the greedy-brained ape: Book Review

Tim Radford
Nature.com
Originally published 30 Oct 19

Here is an excerpt:

For her hugely enjoyable sprint through human evolutionary history, Vince (erstwhile news editor of this journal) intertwines many threads: language and writing; the command of tools, pursuit of beauty and appetite for trinkets; and the urge to build things, awareness of time and pursuit of reason. She tracks the cultural explosion, triggered by technological discovery, that gathered pace with the first trade in obsidian blades in East Africa at least 320,000 years ago. That has climaxed this century with the capacity to exploit 40% of the planet’s total primary production.

How did we do it? Vince examines, for instance, our access to and use of energy. Other primates must chew for five hours a day to survive. Humans do so for no more than an hour. We are active 16 hours a day, a tranche during which other mammals sleep. We learn by blind variation and selective retention. Vince proposes that our ancestors enhanced that process of learning from each other with the command of fire: it is 10 times more efficient to eat cooked meat than raw, and heat releases 50% of all the carbohydrates in cereals and tubers.

Thus Homo sapiens secured survival and achieved dominance by exploiting extra energy. The roughly 2,000 calories ideally consumed by one human each day generates about 90 watts: enough energy for one incandescent light bulb. At the flick of a switch or turn of a key, the average human now has access to roughly 2,300 watts of energy from the hardware that powers our lives — and the richest have much more.

The book review is here.

For whom does determinism undermine moral responsibility? Surveying the conditions for free will across cultures

Ivar Hannikainen and others
PsyArXiv Preprints
Originally published October 15, 2019

Abstract

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions.

The research is here.

Privacy is a collective concern

Carissa Veliz
newstatesman.com
Originally published 22 OCT 2019

People often give a personal explanation of whether they protect the privacy of their data. Those who don’t care much about privacy might say that they have nothing to hide. Those who do worry about it might say that keeping their personal data safe protects them from being harmed by hackers or unscrupulous companies. Both positions assume that caring about and protecting one’s privacy is a personal matter. This is a common misunderstanding.

It’s easy to assume that because some data is “personal”, protecting it is a private matter. But privacy is both a personal and a collective affair, because data is rarely used on an individual basis.

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Because we are intertwined in ways that make us vulnerable to each other, we are responsible for each other’s privacy. I might, for instance, be extremely careful with my phone number and physical address. But if you have me as a contact in your mobile phone and then give access to companies to that phone, my privacy will be at risk regardless of the precautions I have taken. This is why you shouldn’t store more sensitive data than necessary in your address book, post photos of others without their permission, or even expose your own privacy unnecessarily. When you expose information about yourself, you are almost always exposing information about others.

The info is here.

Should we create artificial moral agents? A Critical Analysis

John Danaher
Philosophical Disquisitions
Originally published September 21, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

So what argument is being made? At first, it might look like Sharkey is arguing that moral agency depends on biology, but I think that is a bit of a red herring. What she is arguing is that moral agency depends on emotions (particularly second personal emotions such as empathy, sympathy, shame, regret, anger, resentment etc). She then adds to this the assumption that you cannot have emotions without having a biological substrate. This suggests that Sharkey is making something like the following argument:

(1) You cannot have explicit moral agency without having second personal emotions.

(2) You cannot have second personal emotions without being constituted by a living biological substrate.

(3) Robots cannot be constituted by a living biological substrate.

(4) Therefore, robots cannot have explicit moral agency.

Assuming this is a fair reconstruction of the reasoning, I have some questions about it. First, taking premises (2) and (3) as a pair, I would query whether having a biological substrate really is essential for having second personal emotions. What is the necessary connection between biology and emotionality? This smacks of biological mysterianism or dualism to me, almost a throwback to the time when biologists thought that living creatures possessed some élan vital that separated them from the inanimate world. Modern biology and biochemistry casts all that into doubt. Living creatures are — admittedly extremely complicated — evolved biochemical machines. There is no essential and unbridgeable chasm between the living and the inanimate.

The info is here.

Seven Key Misconceptions about Evolutionary Psychology

Laith Al-Shawaf
www.areomagazine.com
Originally published August 20, 2019

Evolutionary approaches to psychology hold the promise of revolutionizing the field and unifying it with the biological sciences. But among both academics and the general public, a few key misconceptions impede its application to psychology and behavior. This essay tackles the most pervasive of these.

Misconception 1: Evolution and Learning Are Conflicting Explanations for Behavior

People often assume that if something is learned, it’s not evolved, and vice versa. This is a misleading way of conceptualizing the issue, for three key reasons.

First, many evolutionary hypotheses are about learning. For example, the claim that humans have an evolved fear of snakes and spiders does not mean that people are born with this fear. Instead, it means that humans are endowed with an evolved learning mechanism that acquires a fear of snakes more easily and readily than other fears. Classic studies in psychology show that monkeys can acquire a fear of snakes through observational learning, and they tend to acquire it more quickly than a similar fear of other objects, such as rabbits or flowers. It is also harder for monkeys to unlearn a fear of snakes than it is to unlearn other fears. As with monkeys, the hypothesis that humans have an evolved fear of snakes does not mean that we are born with this fear. Instead, it means that we learn this fear via an evolved learning mechanism that is biologically prepared to acquire some fears more easily than others.

Second, learning is made possible by evolved mechanisms instantiated in the brain. We are able to learn because we are equipped with neurocognitive mechanisms that enable learning to occur—and these neurocognitive mechanisms were built by evolution. Consider the fact that both children and puppies can learn, but if you try to teach them the same thing—French, say, or game theory—they end up learning different things. Why? Because the dog’s evolved learning mechanisms are different from those of the child. What organisms learn, and how they learn it, depends on the nature of the evolved learning mechanisms housed in their brains.

The info is here.

Allegations of sexual assault, cocaine use among SEAL teams prompt 'culture' review

Barbara Starr
CNN.com
Originally posted August 12, 2019

In the wake of several high-profile scandals, including allegations of sexual assault and cocaine use against Navy SEAL team members, the four-star general in charge of all US special operations has ordered a review of the culture and ethics of the elite units.

"Recent incidents have called our culture and ethics into question and threaten the trust placed in us," Gen. Richard Clarke, head of Special Operations Command, said in a memo to the entire force.
While the memo did not mention specific incidents, it comes after an entire SEAL platoon was recently sent home from Iraq following allegations of sexual assault and drinking alcohol during their down time -- which is against regulations.

Another recent case involved an internal Navy investigation that found members of SEAL Team 10 allegedly abused cocaine and other illicit substances while they were stationed in Virginia last year. The members were subsequently disciplined.

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"I don't know yet if we have a culture problem, I do know that we have a good order and discipline problem that must be addressed immediately," Green said.

In early July, a military court decided Navy SEAL team leader Eddie Gallagher, a one-time member of SEAL Team 7, would be demoted in rank and have his pay reduced for posing for a photo with a dead ISIS prisoner while he was serving in Iraq. Another SEAL was sentenced in June for his role in the 2017 death of Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar, a Green Beret, in Bamako, Mali.

The info is here.

There is no Universal Objective Morality

An Interview with Homi Bhabha
Interviewer: Paula Erizanu

Here is an excerpt:

What does that imply for human rights conventions?

Those who assert the absolute nature of morality are not aware of how much power – political and personal power – gets mixed into the moral idea. The same person who would kneel in church and pray for God’s notion of universal love and brotherhood would go and lynch a person of colour, or would do violence to an untouchable in India. So, morality has to be understood in terms of power and authority in addition to circumstances, cases, forms of interpretation.

Moralities  are enlightened recommendations about how to live your life in a way that is fair and responsible towards others. But at the same time, the question of morality gets so mixed in with political power, with issues of affect, making people anxious, nervous about their conditions, making people feel like they live in a world of insecurity and threat. You know, it’s a much more complex package than can be understood in terms of universal moralities on the one hand, or objective and subjective moralities on the other.

For a number of important legal and political reasons, we want to go with the UDHR and absolutely support the view that all people are born equal, that all people have a foundational dignity, and therefore deserve the protections and provisions of human rights. Having said that, we know from long and bitter experience that only too often states find ways of violating the human rights of their own peoples and the rights of other peoples and countries. They do so with a kind of international impunity, and if I may say so, a collusive insouciance.

There always seem to be forms of legal architecture – however well-intentioned – that make the perfect the enemy of the good, and that is putting it generously. On the negative side, executive orders and states of exception are the enemies of the good. Look at the way in which the basic human rights of Mexicans on the Texan border are being violated on a daily basis. Let me simply refer to a recent comment from the NYT that puts the issue poignantly and pointedly:

“In fact the migrants are mostly victims of the broken immigration system. They are not by and large killers, rapists or gang members. Most do not carry drugs. They have learned how to make asylum claims, just as the law allows them to do.”

The info is here.

The Technology of Kindness—How social media can rebuild our empathy—and why it must.

Jamil Zaki
Scientific American
Originally posted August 6, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Technology also builds new communities around kindness. Consider the paradox of rare illnesses such as cystic fibrosis or myasthenia gravis. Each affects fewer than one in 1,000 people but there are many such conditions, meaning there are many people who suffer in ways their friends and neighbors don’t understand. Millions have turned to online forums, such as Facebook groups or the site RareConnect. In 2011 Priya Nambisan, a health policy expert, surveyed about 800 members of online health forums. Users reported that these groups offer helpful tips and information but also described them as heartfelt communities, full of compassion and commiseration.

allowing anyone to count on the kindness of strangers. These sites train users to provide empathetic social support and then unleash their goodwill on one another. Some express their struggles; others step in to provide support. Users find these platforms deeply soothing. In a 2015 survey, 7cups users described the kindness they received on the site to be as helpful as professional psychotherapy. Users on these sites also benefit from helping others. In a 2017 study, psychologist Bruce Doré and his colleagues assigned people to use either Koko or another Web site and tested their subsequent well-being. Koko users’ levels of depression dropped after spending time on the site, especially when they used it to support others.

The info is here.

Chances are, you’re not as open-minded as you think

David Epstein
The Washington Post
Originally published July 20, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

The lesson is clear enough: Most of us are probably not as open-minded as we think. That is unfortunate and something we can change. A hallmark of teams that make good predictions about the world around them is something psychologists call “active open mindedness.” People who exhibit this trait do something, alone or together, as a matter of routine that rarely occurs to most of us: They imagine their own views as hypotheses in need of testing.

They aim not to bring people around to their perspective but to encourage others to help them disprove what they already believe. This is not instinctive behavior. Most of us, armed with a Web browser, do not start most days by searching for why we are wrong.

As our divisive politics daily feed our tilt toward confirmation bias, it is worth asking if this instinct to think we know enough is hardening into a habit of poor judgment. Consider that, in a study during the run-up to the Brexit vote, a small majority of both Remainers and Brexiters could correctly interpret made-up statistics about the efficacy of a rash-curing skin cream. But when the same voters were given similarly false data presented as if it indicated that immigration either increased or decreased crime, hordes of Brits suddenly became innumerate and misinterpreted statistics that disagreed with their beliefs.

The info is here.

The Theory That Justified Anti-Gay Crime

Caleb Crain
The New Yorker
Originally posted June 26, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

As preposterous as the idea of homosexual panic may sound today, for much of the twentieth century it was treated as something like common sense. “When a beast attacks, you are justified in killing him,” is the way one defense attorney phrased the principle behind it, in 1940. The press, too, sometimes discussed the idea approvingly. The New York Daily News described a 1944 murder of a gay man as an “honor slaying.” In 1952, homosexual panic was listed as a mental disorder in the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and, as late as the nineteen-nineties, the notion was still so current in the popular mind that a Christopher Street shop selling gay-themed T-shirts was called, in what seems to have been ironic homage, Don’t Panic.

It turns out that the psychological concept has a less than illustrious origin. The term “homosexual panic,” Polchin reports, was coined by a psychiatrist named Edward Kempf, in a 1920 treatise titled “Psychopathology.” Polchin garbles a key quote from Kempf, printing “sexually attracted” where Kempf wrote “sexually attractive,” and I took a look at the relevant chapter to see if I could make sense of it. It’s understandable that Polchin got confused. Kempf’s text is neither lucid nor coherent.

Kempf theorized that homosexual panic emerged from “the pressure of uncontrollable perverse sexual cravings,” that is, from the frustration of homosexual urges that typically arose in same-sex environments, such as prison or the military. According to Kempf, symptoms of the panic included a fearfulness that could lead to catatonia, a “compulsion to seek or submit to assault,” and delusional perceptions of being poisoned or entranced. Indeed, the hallucinations and paranoid delusions that many of Kempf’s patients suffered from were quite serious. One patient imagined that broken pills were being surreptitiously put into his pudding; another went through spells of believing he was God.

The info is here.

Civic honesty around the globe

Alain Cohn, Michel André Maréchal, David Tannenbaum, & Christian Lukas Zünd
Science  20 Jun 2019:
DOI: 10.1126/science.aau8712

Abstract

Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions, and measured whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets. In virtually all countries citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Both non-experts and professional economists were unable to predict this result. Additional data suggest our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.

Here is the conclusion:

Our findings also represent a unique data set for examining cross-country differences in civic honesty. Honesty is a key component of social capital, and here we provide an objective measure to supplement the large body of work that has traditionally examined social capital using subjective survey measures. Using average response rates across countries, we find substantial variation in rates of civic honesty, ranging from 14% to 76%. This variation largely persists even when controlling for a country’s gross domestic product, suggesting that other factors besides country wealth are also at play. In the supplementary materials, we provide an analysis suggesting that economically favorable geographic conditions, inclusive political institutions, national education, and cultural values that emphasize moral norms extending beyond one’s in-group are also positively associated with rates of civic honesty. Future research is needed to identify how these and other factors may contribute to societal differences in honest behavior.

The research is here.

Americans Say U.S. Moral Values Not Good and Getting Worse

Megan Brenan
news.gallup.com
Originally posted May 31, 2019

Americans continue to rate U.S. moral values negatively, on balance, and overwhelmingly agree that they are getting worse. These readings, from Gallup's May 1-12 Values poll, are the latest in the 18-year trend that shows similarly bleak findings.

For the third consecutive year, 77% of Americans think moral values in the U.S. are getting worse, slightly below Gallup's all-time 82% high in 2007. Just 19% currently believe that morals are getting better.

The info is here.

More than 300 overworked NHS nurses have died by suicide in just seven years

Alan Selby
The Mirror
Originally posted April 27, 2019

More than 300 nurses have taken their own lives in just seven years, shocking new figures reveal.

During the worst year, one was dying by suicide EVERY WEEK as Tory cuts began to bite deep into the NHS.

Today victims’ families call for vital early mental health training and support for young nurses – and an end to a “bullying and toxic culture” in the health service which leaves them afraid to ask for help in their darkest moments.

One mum – whose trainee nurse daughter Lucy de Oliveira killed herself while juggling other jobs to make ends meet – told us: “They’re working all hours God sends doing a really important job. Most of them would be better off working in McDonald’s. That can’t be right.”

Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth has called for a government inquiry into the “alarming” figures – 23 per cent higher than the national average – from 2011 to 2017, the latest year on record.

“Every life lost is a desperate tragedy,” he said. “The health and wellbeing of NHS staff must never be compromised.”

The info is here.

Who Should Decide How Algorithms Decide?

Mark Esposito, Terence Tse, Joshua Entsminger, and Aurelie Jean
Project-Syndicate
Originally published April 17, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Consider the following scenario: a car from China has different factory standards than a car from the US, but is shipped to and used in the US. This Chinese-made car and a US-made car are heading for an unavoidable collision. If the Chinese car’s driver has different ethical preferences than the driver of the US car, which system should prevail?

Beyond culturally based differences in ethical preferences, one also must consider differences in data regulations across countries. A Chinese-made car, for example, might have access to social-scoring data, allowing its decision-making algorithm to incorporate additional inputs that are unavailable to US carmakers. Richer data could lead to better, more consistent decisions, but should that advantage allow one system to overrule another?

Clearly, before AVs take to the road en masse, we will need to establish where responsibility for algorithmic decision-making lies, be it with municipal authorities, national governments, or multilateral institutions. More than that, we will need new frameworks for governing this intersection of business and the state. At issue is not just what AVs will do in extreme scenarios, but how businesses will interact with different cultures in developing and deploying decision-making algorithms.

The info is here.

The 'debate of the century': what happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek

Stephen Marche

The Guardian
Originally published April 20, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

The great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had.

One hated communism. The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. The first one agreed that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. And that was basically it. They both wanted the same thing: capitalism with regulation, which is what every sane person wants. The Peterson-Žižek encounter was the ultra-rare case of a debate in 2019 that was perhaps too civil.

They needed enemies, needed combat, because in their solitudes, they had so little to offer. Peterson is neither a racist nor a misogynist. He is a conservative. He seemed, in person, quite gentle. But when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. Somehow hectoring mobs have managed to turn him into an icon of all they are not. Remove him from his enemies and he is a very poor example of a very old thing – the type of writer whom, from Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, have promised simple answers to complex problems. Rules for Life, as if there were such things.

The info is here.

No Support for Historical Candidate Gene or Candidate Gene-by-Interaction Hypotheses for Major Depression Across Multiple Large Samples

Richard Border, Emma C. Johnson, and others
The American Journal of Psychiatry
https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18070881

Abstract

Objective:
Interest in candidate gene and candidate gene-by-environment interaction hypotheses regarding major depressive disorder remains strong despite controversy surrounding the validity of previous findings. In response to this controversy, the present investigation empirically identified 18 candidate genes for depression that have been studied 10 or more times and examined evidence for their relevance to depression phenotypes.

Methods:
Utilizing data from large population-based and case-control samples (Ns ranging from 62,138 to 443,264 across subsamples), the authors conducted a series of preregistered analyses examining candidate gene polymorphism main effects, polymorphism-by-environment interactions, and gene-level effects across a number of operational definitions of depression (e.g., lifetime diagnosis, current severity, episode recurrence) and environmental moderators (e.g., sexual or physical abuse during childhood, socioeconomic adversity).

Results:
No clear evidence was found for any candidate gene polymorphism associations with depression phenotypes or any polymorphism-by-environment moderator effects. As a set, depression candidate genes were no more associated with depression phenotypes than noncandidate genes. The authors demonstrate that phenotypic measurement error is unlikely to account for these null findings.

Conclusions:
The study results do not support previous depression candidate gene findings, in which large genetic effects are frequently reported in samples orders of magnitude smaller than those examined here. Instead, the results suggest that early hypotheses about depression candidate genes were incorrect and that the large number of associations reported in the depression candidate gene literature are likely to be false positives.

The research is here.

Editor's note: Depression is a complex, multivariate experience that is not primarily genetic in its origins.

Pop Culture, AI And Ethics

Phaedra Boinodiris
Forbes.com
Originally published February 24, 2019

Here is an excerpt:


5 Areas of Ethical Focus

The guide goes on to outline five areas of ethical focus or consideration:

Accountability – there is a group responsible for ensuring that REAL guests in the hotel are interviewed to determine their needs. When feedback is negative this group implements a feedback loop to better understand preferences. They ensure that at any point in time, a guest can turn the AI off.

Fairness – If there is bias in the system, the accountable team must take the time to train with a larger, more diverse set of data.Ensure that the data collected about a user's race, gender, etc. in combination with their usage of the AI, will not be used to market to or exclude certain demographics.

Explainability and Enforced Transparency – if a guest doesn’t like the AI’s answer, she can ask how it made that recommendation using which dataset. A user must explicitly opt in to use the assistant and provide the guest options to consent on what information to gather.

User Data Rights – The hotel does not own a guest’s data and a guest has the right to have the system purges at any time. Upon request, a guest can receive a summary of what information was gathered by the Ai assistant.

Value Alignment – Align the experience to the values of the hotel. The hotel values privacy and ensuring that guests feel respected and valued. Make it clear that the AI assistant is not designed to keep data or monitor guests. Relay how often guest data is auto deleted. Ensure that the AI can speak in the guest’s respective language.

The info is here.

China Uses "Ethics" as Censorship

China sets up a video game ethics panel in its new approval process

Owen S. Good
www.polygon.com
Originally posted December 8, 2018

In China, it’s about ethics in video games.

The South China Morning Post reports that the nation now has an “Online Game Ethics Committee,” as a part of the government’s laborious process for game censorship approvals. China Central Television, the state’s broadcaster, said this ethics-in-games committee was formed to address national concerns over internet addiction, “unsuitable content” and childhood myopia (nearsightedness, apparently with video games as a cause?)

The state TV report said the committee has already looked at 20 games, rejecting nine and ruling that the other 11 have to change “certain content.” The titles of the games were not revealed.

The info is here.

Ethics of missionary work called into question after death of American missionary John Allen Chau

Holly Meyer
Nashville Tennessean
Originally published December 2, 2018

Christians are facing scrutiny for evangelizing in remote parts of the world after members of an isolated tribe in the Bay of Bengal killed a U.S. missionary who was trying to tell them about Jesus.

The death of John Allen Chau raises questions about the ethics of missionary work and whether he acted appropriately by contacting the Sentinelese, a self-sequestered Indian tribe that has resisted outside contact for thousands of years.

It is tragic, but figuring out what can be learned from Chau's death honors his memory and passion, said Scott Harris, the missions minister at Brentwood Baptist Church and a former trustee chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board.

"In general, evaluation and accountability is so needed," Harris said. "Maturing fieldworkers that have a heart for the cultures of the world will welcome honest, hard questions." 

The info is here.

Why Are Doctors Killing Themselves?

The Practical Professional in Healthcare
October/November 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The nation loses 300 to 400 physicians each year, the equivalent of two large medical school classes, and more than a million patients lose their doctor.  According to a new research study encompassing data from the past ten years, physicians are committing suicide at a rate that’s more than twice as high as the average population—higher even than for veterans.

With a critical shortage of physicians looming and advocates like Pamela Wible calling attention to the problem, the increasingly urgent question remains: Why are doctors killing themselves? And what can be done to help?  In response, researchers are ramping up their efforts to understand the causes of
physician suicide; leading hospitals, medical schools and professional organizations are pioneering new programs and interventions; and regulators are reconsidering how they might revise the licensing/renewal process to support their efforts.

The info is here.

There are several other articles on physician self-care, which applies to other helping professions.