Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
‘Brand consultant’? ‘PR researcher’? Why the ‘bullshit jobs’ era needs to end.
Hypocrisy is a limited measure of moral failing, we need better ones.
Critical thinking instruction in humanities reduces belief in pseudoscience.
How Aristotle created the computer (well, okay, indirectly of course).
A very bizarre article about how science will chemically “improve” love and relationships.
The Academy’s (alleged) assault on intellectual diversity.
Footnotes to Plato 
The maternal oxytocin issue is completely irrelevant to the confusions between lust/love in the article in question. As has been noted, repeatedly, all interlocutors here admit we are biological entities; but one here, although denying it, refuses to recognize that we are also social entities, and that certain purely social phenomena are not reducible to biology or chemistry.
Scientismist in the singles bar: ‘Here, take this pill and you’ll want to have sex with me; take another, and you’ll want to have sex with only me, no one else. Take this third pill, and you will want to have sex with me for a protracted length of time, maybe years. We’ll call that ‘love,’ baby, what do ya say?’
‘That’s creepy, get away from me!’
‘Ah, your mamma!’
We want to have sex with a body; we fall in love with a person. Is the complexity of our social being itself a result of the evolution of a particular species of hominid? Yes, but once the social being comes into its own, it has to be considered independently of its origins if we are ever to understand it. And in fact that’s what we do all the time, in order to live a social existence. There is an indefinite number of possible ways to relate to that social existence. Explaining it in reductive biological terms is one evident means of avoiding some of the inescapable messiness of living with others and having to take into consideration their feelings, their histories, their communities.
“My spouse… died last week…I’m not sure how to cope….”
“Hey, take this pill and have sex with someone, you’ll forget all about it!’
Not a brave new world; not even science; more like science fiction: A role-playing game in an artificial environment; where nobody loses, but nobody wins; because there’d be nothing worth winning anymore.
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Bunsen, per Massimo, this is also why addiction experts talk about psychological addiction as well as physical addiction.
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EJ: Maybe there’s an antisocial entity or two?
That said, since we’re on scientism and the piece was about lust? Screw people (I see what I just did) and pop on your Oculus Rift googles and off to virtual reality.
Science fiction indeed.
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Hi Michael
It reminds me of the famous exchange between a judge and witness “You say the mother neglected the child, doesn’t that mean the father neglected the child too?” “No you Honour, how could he? He wasn’t even there.”
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Massimo:
Well I certainly didn’t expect a bunch of platitudes in reply. Can you provide some substance to your assertions. What does it mean to be detached from the real world? Do books and movies also detach you from the real world? Why is this a bad thing if done temporarily.
Also, what in the world is an artificial feeling? If I am cranky in the morning before I have my coffee, is that artificial and ‘not really there’? What if I get emotional reading a book? What’s the demarcation between real and artificial feelings and why would it depend on the type of external stimulus you use?
And as for ‘ … and more often than not result in addictive or otherwise destructive behavior’ – Honestly? You really don’t know much about this subject other than hysteria you get from the media. Just about anything can be addictive and lead to destructive behaviour – including food.
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So, yes, I would first check the methodology of that study which showed that in 80% of child neglect cases the mother was neglecting the child but the father wasn’t.
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Bunsen,
Sorry to bother you with “platitudes,” but you can google the evidence just as well as I can.
If you don’t see what the difference is between artificial feelings and normal ones, or between addiction in the benign sense of the word (caffeine) and in the pathological one I can’t help you. But google probably can, if you bother.
And what ej said. And Socratic. And Dan. (But not Coel, definitely not Coel.)
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Hi ej,
And then there’s “and take this nasal spray, so you won’t neglect our kids when I am back at the singles bar”
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Bunsen Burner:
Well that pretty much ignores everything I wrote by way of criticizing the piece.
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We want to have sex with a body; we fall in love with a person.
= = =
Thank you EJ. But it’s lost on the robot crowd here.
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I managed the transition from promiscuous mountain vole to monogamous prairie vole without the aid of drugs and I suspect others have.
But suppose I hadn’t, why would I want a drug to make me into something I’m not?
“Because you care about your partner and children” you might say.
But clearly if I am still running with the mountain voles then we have empirically disproven that proposition.
Because I ought to care about these things? Says who?
But I can imagine that if I really did care about my family and could not help myself and was desparately inhappy about the situation then I might take that treatment. I would consider that more of a case of treating a disorder than chemically improving a relationship.
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Robin,
Yup, exactly.
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Incidentally I can think of another solution for people who have more libido than their partners but who want to remain monogamous. Unfortunately it doesn’t put any more money in the pockets of big pharma.
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Given the degrees to which many of these issues are going parabolic, we seem to be headed for more of a Blade Runner world. Brave New World seems quaint.
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Do robots dream of monogamous relationships….
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“the difference is between artificial feelings and normal ones” – vitalism is alive and well. And if I am severely depressed, then this is natural, and when I am treated with ECT, my changed mood is artificial? Surely the dark night of the soul is one of the most authentic human experiences, leading to insight and creativity? There are definite differences between individual in terms of their emotional lives which are neither cultural nor due to contra-causal will. Some of the bases of these differences will be accessible to manipulation by drugs.
As usual, science fiction has played with every possible permutation you could think of…”we are the oldest love-dispensing firm in the business, and much larger than Passions Unlimited…our product is not a substitute. It is the exact selfsame feeling that poets and writers have raved about for thousands of years. Through the wonders of modern science we can bring this feeling to you at your convenience, attractively packaged, completely disposable, and for a ridiculously low price.” [Sheckley, Playboy 1956]
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Are emojis real emotion?
What if I send a heart to someone I really love?
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I thought the computer article was good. I first encountered the works of Boole and De Morgan in an electrical engineering course. I wonder if that skews my attitude to logic.
I am a little disappointed though that Ada Lovelace didn’t get a mention.
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For some reason I’m reminded of a bit by Lenny Bruce. When his wife was pregnant, he had a one night stand with one of her nurses. His wife found out, which led to public fights, which he turned into this dialogue (or rather, something like it; this is paraphrased from memory):
‘You schtupped my nurse?!’
‘Well, the neighbor ate their chicken….’
‘What, you schtupped the chicken? I’m disgusted! You’d schtup mud if you could!’
‘It was clean mud, it had just rained….’
‘You schtupped mud?! I’m going home to mother!’
‘I didn’t schtup her, she was on the rag….’
‘You’d schtup the tree if it didn’t have thorns.’
‘I found that out the hard way.’
‘Well, what could I say to her – trees, mud, chickens… I’m a guy; when you’re in the mood, what can you do?’
Bruce gets some points for his (somewhat painful) honesty. But it has to be remembered that he was a heroin addict at the time. That may go to the question of what constitutes ‘artificial feelings.’ Drugs will diminish our capacity for higher level responses to social situations.
But overall, I find that Bruce’s remarks, rather than reduce love to mere biological responses, does exactly the reverse. It reveals that those who do so, reduce experience to virtually solipsistic self-gratification. Why not just take a pill that enhances masturbation? Reproduction can always take place in a test-tube, right?
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David,
Seriously, now you are accusing me, an evolutionary biologist, of vitalism? I really wish people took the time to read and ponder before they reache for their keyboard. But then again, we would have far fewer comments per thread…
If you are severely depressed you have a disease, so yes, you should get treatment. And yes, in a sense your “normal” mood would be artificial. But you really can’t tell the difference between that and the case of a love potion that makes you fall for whatever person, regardless of your will and intentions?
And who the hell, ever, talked about contra-causal free will??
If you guys are not bothered by any of this stuff then why not enter the famous Nozick pleasure machine (or Woody Allen’s Orgasmotron) and stay there? Or, as Socratic has suggested, go get a pair of virtual reality glasses and play games all day long.
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Also,
while here – read the article on hypocrisy – not deep, given its brevity, but insightful: “But as a diagnosis of the gap between what we ought to do and what we do do, hypocrisy can have reforming power only if there’s a reason to aim higher. By itself, hypocrisy does not test for goodness, badness, efficacy, or even purity of intention—it can only test for and demand consistency.” My one quibble: The suggestion that a democracy especially finds hypocrisy distasteful. As De Tocqueville recognized, quite the reverse is true. In a society conditioned to public response open to peer pressure, democracy actually cannot function properly without some degree of hypocrisy, as part of the respect we show to those with whom we disagree but must work with.
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Massimo, to some degree, what’s going to end the “bullshit jobs” issue in the US is these three things:
First. Getting rid of much of the baggage of the Protestant work ethic
Second. Getting rid of the modern idea, a blend of the first and New Ageism, that “we’re all in sales now.”
Third. Getting people to start thinking in terms of a guaranteed basic income — with the side stipulation that this NOT be any version of GBI generated by a libertarian think tank, and thus including things like elimination of most entitlements because “well, they’re now just part of GBI.”
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Other than piling on Coel for being such a cad, I’m not sure how well the other side explores the argument. It is a very complex and subjective landscape. Is “true love” more than the sum of its parts? Does will trump desire, or are our desires for deep interpersonal roots more culturally conditioned than just “scattering seeds?” We could turn this around and argue those deep interpersonal roots are also nativist and if we are to truly love our ‘fellow man,’ wouldn’t that override personal relationships?
Not taking Coel’s side, so much as pointing out there are multiple issues here.
Again to raise my first point, the contrast seems to be between attraction and trust, aka, love and respect.
Now some might quibble and say you can’t really love someone, without respecting them, but that is a quibble. We likely all know people whom we have attractions, but are smart enough not to get too attached to them. It’s hard to say that primal attraction is not some degree of love. How would one describe love, that is not primal?
Yet when we get to respect, then a whole network of allegiances is pulled into the situation. Not to mention the other will have networks in conflict with your own, leading back to the trust issue…
For those of us with questionable will, it helps to be slightly misanthropic, in order to sustain a monogamous relationship.
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In regard to the study on critical thinking and pseudoscience: the sample size of the study is pretty small, and I wonder how well this would generalize given the rather flexible ways that critical thinking can be deemed to have been taught as such. Certainly just teaching logical fallacies as was mentioned in the article can itself be done in wildly different ways, and certainly some are more effective than others. I’d think many more similar studies, and then a metastudy of those, might be more revealing.
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And, time to snark more on the Aristotle and Internet piece. (Are you sure that Plato didn’t invent the Net along with Chromebooks?)
First: I think Bentham invented the Internet, or what it’s become today, It IS, after all, a sort of panopticon, with both Big Gov and Big Biz spying on you.
Second, I think Pythagoras, not Aristotle, invented the Net. It is all about numbers, the coding of 0 and 1, and Pythagoras is that guy.
Third, I think Leucippus and Democritus invented the Net. Atoms and the subatomic particles. That inspired scientists more than Aristotle.
Yes, logic gates are very arguably derived from Aristotle. That said, nobody’s claiming a computer has a final cause. And, while Boole may have been influenced by Aristotle, nobody’s claiming that about Charles Babbage or Alan Turing.
I’m coming to the conclusion that Atlantic is slouching more and more toward Gomorrah, with its high dose of neoliberalism on many politics-related articles getting supplemented by upper-middlebrow longform semi-clickbait like this.
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Alan — also, a study like that might also need a greater degree of longitudinalness (I’m an editor, browser spell-checker, I get to invent words on occasion) than it appears to have. Lemme know if studying British lit has that anti-pseudoscience effect 5 years from now.
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On the issue of influence and why ‘progress happens one funeral at a time;’
(Biases, not blockages)
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Thanks Socratic. Empirical bases for sweeping conclusions are too frequently given a pass simply because they are empirical. We need to be vested in truth in a much more guarded way than to accept singular studies as significant, unless the data base is just too huge to be ignored. But then again the recent failure of stats in the Presidential election should give us pause even there. I blogged Sam Wang about worries on the reliability of data given that people very selectively respond to cold calls on land-lines and cell-phones about two weeks out from the election, but he didn’t reply. Nov. 8 was reply enough.
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Alan, I “called out” Wang on other stuff, too. Both he and Nate Silver had, in my opinion, gotten a combo of big heads and thin skin from the last couple of elections before.
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Assuming the emotion pills could even work and not have a horrendous amount of side-effects, I would not trust our society with them at all. We have this idea that negative emotions or negative experiences are a complete dead loss, rather than a part and parcel of life.
But it is the valleys of life that let us appreciate the peaks. I no doubt appreciate my wife more because I went through a stage of loneliness prior to meeting her.
Rather than put in the effort of building a healthy relationship, my wife and I could just take emotion pills every day, but where’s the authenticity in that?
We should feel happiness at a wedding day or a new birth. We should feel sadness when a loved one dies. It’s hard to fathom that anyone truly believes that taking shortcuts, to make ourselves into pleasure robots or love robots, is a good idea.
To me, it would be a strange new form of suicide, and anyone who lived that way would not be living at all but just marking time.
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