Ten Politically-Incorrect Truths About Human nature

11. Publishing houses desperate for a new Freakanomics.

you should stick to writing about headphones or whatever

there was an onion story once, about what happens when you become a home-owner.

Hardly any of this has anything to do with political correctness.

What does it take to become a "truth"? Just be statistically above average in terms of likelihood? That doesn't make something "true".

Hardly any of this has anything to do with political correctness proper reasoning

Psychology Today is so dreadful

Oh lord there are so many mistakes of logic in every paragraph I don't even know where to begin.

"A new study of Polish women shows that women with large breasts and tight waists have the greatest fecundity..."

haw.

Statistically, 75% of men have IQs less than 120.

So is it a politcally incorrect truth that most men are not very bright?

(It's the same kind of logic that is being applied to PT's article.)

10/10 for slow day trolling nick!

12. When science disagrees with your prejudice, change science!

most suicide bombers are muslim NOW, but it used to be JAPANESE.

See it's because suicide bombers don't reproduce so the japanese suicide bomber gene didn't get passed along. but muslims all have 18 kids so there's no hope but wiping them all out

can I write for this magazine? I mean, stupid question, but they pay money, don't they? I love money.

psychology today more like psychology two hundred years ago amirite

momus tells me the rates are GOOD

Women with blue eyes should not be any different from those with green or brown eyes. Yet preference for blue eyes seems both universal and undeniable—in males as well as females.

UNDENIABLE

Most men prefer blonde women, which is why African men didn't bother inventing much stuff because there weren't any hot chicks around to impress with their risk taking behavior.

This reminds me of my bouncer mate back home pondering if the influx of Poles into this country would, in 30 years time, stop the average English person being so ugly.

the midlife crisis one is my personal fave, just cos it fits exactly the delusion of someone i know who digs evolutionary psychology.

I love the way I just link the page and RJG assumes that I wrote it or something.

or something

Many women legitimately complain that they have been subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment by their male coworkers. Browne points out that long before women entered the labor force, men subjected each other to such abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment.

True fact: many companies now include "if it was okay during recess, it's okay here!" in their employee handbooks.

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths

Most suicide bombers are Muslim

oh those silly humans, what with their nature

there was an article about this in the daily mail the other day

The sexual harassment one was especially, uh, funny, since I get to read the details of sexual harassment suits every day.

Of course it's common knowledge that before women entered the workforce, bosses would say things like "Why don't you get down on your knees and make yourself useful," and fire them for refusing!

there was an article about this in psychology today today

(fire male workers)

Looking Out
Across The Night-Time
The City Winks A Sleepless Eye
Hear Her Voice
Shake My Window
Sweet Seducing Sighs

Get Me Out
Into The Night-Time
Four Walls Won’t Hold Me Tonight
If This Town
Is Just An Apple
Then Let Me Take A Bite

If They Say -
Why, Why, Tell ‘Em That Is Human Nature
Why, Why, Does He Do Me That Way
If They Say -
Why, Why, Tell ‘Em That Is Human Nature
Why, Why, Does He Do Me That Way

Reaching Out
To Touch A Stranger
Electric Eyes Are Ev’rywhere
See That Girl
She Knows I’m Watching
She Likes The Way I Stare

If They Say -
Why, Why, Tell ‘Em That Is Human Nature
Why, Why, Does He Do Me That Way
If They Say -
Why, Why, Tell ‘Em That Is Human Nature
Why, Why, Does He Do Me That Way
I Like Livin’ This Way
I Like Lovin’ This Way

Looking Out
Across The Morning
The City’s Heart Begins To Beat
Reaching Out
I Touch Her Shoulder
I’m Dreaming Of The Street

If They Say -
Why, Why, Tell ‘Em That Is Human Nature
Why, Why, Does He Do Me That Way
If They Say -
Why, Why, Tell ‘Em That Is Human Nature
Why, Why, Does He Do Me That Way
I Like Livin’ This Way

Until very recently, it was a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, since the size of a woman's breasts has no relationship to her ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman's age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

men: in it for the long haul

in before sag

Satoshi Kanazawa

this is confirming a suspicion i had 'bout evolutionary psychologists.

Alan S. Miller, Ph.D. appears to have done nothing other than write this article

i love the use of evolutionary thought applied to social stuff. thinking of jared diamond, though, or william saletan's column in slate, not these guys.

nothing like confirming the world as it is amirite... they're basically calvinists

The irony is that none of the above is true any longer.

That's not the irony.

I hear Dr. Kanazawa is now working on the "white people drive like this, black people drive like thiiis" question.

yeah what a load, etc... but I think I agree with this though:

The quid pro quo types of harassment are manifestations of men's greater desire for short-term casual sex and their willingness to use any available means to achieve that goal. Feminists often claim that sexual harassment is "not about sex but about power;" Browne contends it is both—men using power to get sex. "To say that it is only about power makes no more sense than saying that bank robbery is only about guns, not about money."

OTOH, this is reeeaaally reaching:

Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are all part of men's repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are not treating women differently from men—the definition of discrimination, under which sexual harassment legally falls—but the opposite: Men harass women precisely because they are not discriminating between men and women

i am amazed that dr k has a teaching post. kind of makes you wonder. i mean, seriously.

"Men GLYNN FROM BIG BROTHER can cognitively understand that many blond women with firm, large breasts are not actually 15 years old, but they still find them attractive because their evolved psychological mechanisms are fooled by modern inventions that did not exist in the ancestral environment."

ten reasons I basically fucking hate most people amirite

there's more where that come from folks!

either they, or their publisher, is wrong even about their own discipline:

Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, enjoy watching a favorite TV show, or feel scared--walking alone at night, we are in part behaving as a human animal with its own unique nature-a nature that essentially stopped evolving 10,000 years ago. Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa re-examine some of the most popular and controversial topics of modern life-and shed a whole new light on why we do the things we do.

that's not possible, strictly speaking

i think it contradicts their point about men being bigger than women because of polyandry, maybe, also?

I read "The Moral Animal," and found it fascinating. I don't think it actually explained anything about human behavior, especially human sexual behavior, but it did explain some fairly complex evolutionary concepts that I had never understood before. I know a whole lot more than I used to about why fish do what they do. A lot of the stuff in there about people, though, was totally discredited a month after the book came out. This "Beautiful People" book is surely some kind of final nail in the coffin of evolutionary psychology. This can't be anything but pure pseudoscience.

i'm not sure if nick is 'doing an ethan' with this or not...

evolutionary psych is a big fucking joke. we have one of these fucks in the psych dept at my school and last month she tried to argue in a lecture that because bonobo clans are controlled by females, they rarely fight (a claim that she didn't support) and this indicates why there are more women involved in activism for peace (another claim that she didn't support).

I think it's irresponsible to write shit like this, and not just from the point of view of logic and reason. This is what people mean when they use the (incorrect) term "social Darwinism." Before you know it, you're thinking about your genes as if they want things (v v lazy, also common) and justifying it because it's science, hey, a dude with a Ph.D. said it.

the trouble is, they're trying to work the chain backwards because they're right-wing choads, not to put too fine a point on it.

it's one thing to view history in huge sweeping terms as a kind of hegelian interplay of biological imperatives blah blah yes, it's another to pick out every shitty piggish thing ppl do and point to something "genetic" and say BEHOLD IT IS ORDAINED

Yep-a-yep. Seems like a "truth about human nature" would have to be universally true among humans in order to qualify as a truth, right? Seems like, to me. After all, what's a human without a human nature?

This makes it tricky, because the temptation would always exist to promote a reasonable generalization to a universal truth, by demoting those humans who do not fit it to non-human status.

i'm ready and willing to believe "politically incorrect" things about "human nature," if the evidence is convincing. A laundry list of TITS OR GTFO LOL behaviors given an LSE stamp of approval?? don't fink so.

the problem already jumps out in that blurb, that we stopped evolving 10k yrs ago. why then? how? doesn't make any sense. they don't seem to differentiate WHAT it is that is subjected to evolutionary pressure. culture (which animals don't have -- the thing that stands between our traits and our environment) moves in evolutionary terms as well

for ten thousand years men have only really liked blondes with big tits and everyone else has been kidding themselves or making do : /

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/breath/Faces_asthma/present_images/VIIB32.gif

busted.

IRL, Cleopatra was actually a blonde. :-/

xp melanin levels dropping in the eurasian population may have happened that recently; you could be more right than you know (half kidding)

& in japan and whatnot...?

other things happened.

hentai is a direct result of sexual frustration from lack of big-boobed blondes

& in japan and whatnot...?

-- That one guy that hit it and quit it, Tuesday, July 10, 2007 12:27 PM (Tuesday, July 10, 2007 12:27 PM) Bookmark Link

now, now, we all know that there was an evolutionary divergence in asia, and that the asian "race" is actually a completely different species! (some people have argued this)

xp look the connection to tig ole bitties is a joke, but the idea that wite ppl are a really recent occurrence is a) hilarious and b) totally POLITICALLY INCORRECT. i need to dig up the article where i read that.

all the more redheads for me

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26human.html?_r=2&ref=science&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

^^^ race is real, genetically. however, europeans, arabs, and south asians are all in the same white-people boat lol

yeah, race is real. that's why any single human population has 98% of all genetic variation in it.

yeah i know i know. the differences are insignificant.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kanazawa.pdf

Until very recently, it was a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, since the size of a woman's breasts has no relationship to her ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman's age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

Men like big breasts because they're hoping to get a soapy tit wank, practical mechanics rather than psychology is the important factor here.

I always assumed big breasts worked like colorful plumage, but I don't have any more evidence to back up that hypothesis than he does his.

im with kenan on the naturalistic fallacy thing that goes on from both sides of the argument but this doesnt make social evolutionary theory bunk. genes dont cause behaviour, no serious scientist accepts genetic determinism but to deny the constraints and and dispositions genes place on behaviour is to my mind "a big fucking joke". their method given our ignorance of past environments is necessarily speculative in explanatory structure ( thus the "just so" stories) but gene predictive strategies and models are becoming increasingly accurate apparently --see recent multidisciplinary models of sociopathic behavior.

The "right wing chaods" comment is binary socialisms "infantile disorder" at its worst, the politicisation of science arguments sucks. That aside, your question "WHAT is subject to evolutionary pressure" is kinda cool.

Im guessing the answer will be "fitness". I think thats the crux where the gene fans fall down-- they dont understand the mind well enough to differentiate the pathways between "gene-culture" for causation. Perhaps Ive been captured by biology but the evidence to me suggests many social behaviours have been shaped by natural selection for reproductive sucess. I think its reasonable to assume selective pressure is not as likely to occur in modern society as in past extreme hostile environmental conditions --ice ages, scarce prey, tough predators etc

http://image.com.com/mp3/images/genie_images/story/2006/v/varg_vikernes_story.jpg
"Preference for blue eyes seems both universal and undeniable. If I look into brown eyes I might as well be looking up their ass; brown is like shit. Of course that makes an impact!"

Has no one figured out that tiny tits sag too? And in a much scarier way, turning into two veiny, semi-translucent deflated woopie cushions?

I read an Ev Psych paper once that was trying to figure out whether men liked big asses because they look like big tits, or if they like big tits because they look like big asses.

I hate ev psych. :(

The Politically Incorrect Guide to...

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51N50BBNJ8L._SS500_.jpg

I read that as "Careers be baby-deniers!"

(because you can't outsource parenting)

Can you imagine fucking Uncle Sam, even for sugar daddy exploitation purposes? He is so grim * unattractive. Srsly, I'd make Colonel Sanders my sugar daddy way before Uncle Sam.

oh yeah! Especially JIVIN' Colonel Sanders.

http://www.gothamist.com/images/2003_11_colsand.jpg

http://www.alan-miller.org/alan-miller-face.jpg
Alan S. Miller

http://nazret.com/blog/media/kana.jpg
Satoshi Kanazawa

KFC was started in Salt Lake City, and the first KFC in southern SLC is ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT. I died & went to the celestial kingdom!

I can see how you might hit that, if only out of gratitude.

If large boobs = you look your age then I for one say yay to my smaller boobs because clearly I will look ridiculously young forever which suits me fine k thx bai.

Lets face it, this article was not written or edited with truth in mind, it was written to get attention. That's what all these "counterintuitive" sub-Freakonomics pieces popping up lately are about - what will make people forward an article to all their friends and bring in more readers. People like to have their prejudiced confirmed by "surprising" and "politically incorrect" "truths" and carefully researched, well-thought out pieces aren't sexy.

Wow.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200706/ten-politically-incorrect-truths-about-human-nature?page=4

"Many believe that men go through a midlife crisis when they are in middle age. Not quite. Many middle-aged men do go through midlife crises, but it's not because they are middle-aged. It's because their wives are."

Skimmed the article, and it is ridiculous. Most of them have nothing to do with 'human nature' and are purely sociological,the most egregious example being 'Most suicide bombers are Muslim'.