Satoshi Kanazawa is wrong (again)

Longtime readers of this blog may remember a post from a couple of years ago - ingeniously entitled "Crazy Kanazawa" - in which I argued LSE evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa's call for a nuclear response to 9/11 was a touch... excessive. It turns out time has not diminished Kanazawa's silliness.

Responding to the astonishing Pew poll that found 18% of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, Kanazawa wrote "If Barack Obama Is Christian, Michael Jackson Was White". This is such a mind-bogglingly stupid article that I suspect any summary from me will come off as a straw man, so I'll just quote Kanazawa at length:

Anybody who believes Barack Obama is Christian must also believe that Michael Jackson was white. Like other world religions, Islam not only is a religion but also comprises largely endogamous ethnic groups. When a group of individuals remain largely or entirely endogamous (marry only other members of the group and not outsiders), forming what geneticists call a deme, they become genetically distinct over time. A long history of endogamy, usually but not always necessitated by geographic or social isolation, is how genetically distinct racial and ethnic groups emerge. Muslims, both in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, are a largely endogamous ethnic group... It’s not only about who you worship; it’s also about who you marry.

One’s genome is entirely determined at the moment of conception, and absolutely nothing that individuals do during their lifetimes can alter the composition of their genes. For most of his adult life, Michael Jackson (apparently) believed he was white and (obviously) wanted to be white. He thus underwent numerous plastic surgeries to look white, and mostly looked and acted white. But his genes were still the same genes that he inherited from his black parents at the moment he was conceived, and no amount of plastic surgery could alter his genes. No matter how white his skin was, underneath he was still just as black as the day he was born.

Similarly, the fact that Barack Obama’s father was a Muslim Kenyan, descended from a long line of Muslims, will remain true until the day he dies, and nothing he ever does in his life can change half of his genes that he inherited from his father. His genes are for keeps. The fact that he has attended Christian church for the past 20 years is not going to change that. Michael Jackson looked white much longer than Barack Obama sat in the pews of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church. Obama is still as (half) Muslim as the day he was born.

Erm... right. So, firstly, Michael Jackson suffered from the skin condition vitiligo and the auto-immune disease lupus, which combined to significantly whiten his skin. Suggesting that he "wanted to be white" is mere speculation, and I'm not sure what the hell it even means to "act white".

Second and more importantly, Kanazawa apparently just doesn't know what the word Muslim means. Communicated meaning is determined by usage and convention, and in the English language the word Muslim refers to someone who believes there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammad was his prophet. Someone who converted to Islam yesterday is as much a Muslim as someone who, like all their ancestors stretching back to the 7th century, was indoctrinated into Islam as a child. (I blush to have to point this out, but, as Richard Dawkins has been repeating for years, no one is born a Muslim or a Christian. We are all born atheists). Now, granted, an author is free to use stipulative definitions - giving a new or specific meaning to a term for the purposes of some discussion - but it is obvious equivocation to defend the 18% of Americans who understand "Muslim" conventionally by invoking an entirely different, stipulative, definition.

It gets worse. Much. Worse. Remember the claim that Obama is "descended from a long line of Muslims"? Rather embarrassingly for someone making an argument like Kanazawa's, that's... erm... not true. His father, Barrack Obama Sr., was raised Muslim, was non-practicing and later became an atheist. His step-father was also "non-practicing" Muslim. His mother, Ann Dunham, was either an atheist or an agnostic. His grandfather, Hussein Obama, first converted to Catholicism, and later to Islam. His grandmother, Habiba Obama also converted to Islam later in life. Yes, that's right: Obama's grandparents converted to Islam. In other words... Kanazawa's argument is so mind-bendingly stupid that it's not only invalid, misguided, misleading, and has false supporting premises, it actually has a false major premise. Such sloppiness deserves nothing but contempt and ridicule.

Hat Tip: Jeff Martin.

English Libel Law Reform

I have written repeatedly about the urgent need for England to reform its libel laws (here is why). The Libel Reform Campaign has been doing a great job in pushing this issue onto the agenda, and one good way to help, urged on supporters recently by the long-suffering Simon Singh, is to sign the reform petition. Please do so if you haven't already...

Elections and faces

Alexander Todorov is the leading researcher in the fascinating and rapid-evolving field I'm doing my graduate research in -- the effects of rapid facial judgments on political elections. So I was happy to see that he (and co-author Christopher Olivola) recently wrote a popular article for Scientific American magazine summarizing this line of research. A titbit:

Although we would like to assume that voters are too sophisticated and rational to be swayed by superficial cues, the research paints a much less flattering picture. Even when it comes to electing their leaders, it seems, people are heavily influenced by the images that these politicians project (even unwittingly). In particular, politicians with facial features that make them look like they possess strong leadership qualities seem to be at an advantage, at least among some voters. (Appearing like a leader seems to be tied up with perceived competence, and is different from appearing attractive.) Research by Gabriel Lenz and Chappell Lawson at MIT shows that candidate appearances have the strongest impact on voters who possess little political knowledge and spend a lot of time in front of their television screens.

Prayer in SA schools

Science journalist Leonie Joubert has an excellent article in the Mail & Guardian taking on ANC president Jacob Zuma's support for daily prayer in South African schools. An excerpt:

The point, Jacob Zuma, is that we don't need pious school leavers; we need ones who are developing razor-keen skills so that they can keep this country on the road to modernity. I'd like some of them to become super-healers, the kinds of doctors, nurses and medical researchers who are so good at what they do that the ruling party won't have to suffer the indignity of sending its ailing leaders off to the hospitals of former colonisers to get decent medical treatment. So let's leave the teachers to do their jobs -- teach -- and spare them the distraction of daily incantations.

Joubert also writes a blog, Scorched... why hadn't I heard about her previously?!

(Via Skeptic South Africa).

Bye bye Manto, bye bye MCC

Unsurprisingly, I'm not the only one celebrating the axing of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. Fellow South African skeptical bloggers Irreverence and subtle shift in emphasis are also overjoyed, as is the local media. Perhaps a tad surprisingly, the international media has also reacted: CNN, The Scotsman, BBC News, the Associated Press and several others carried the happy news of Manto's ouster.

Again, however, the news is not all good... I found out via Nature News that parliament quietly passed the "Medicines and Related Substances Amendment Bill" (pdf) two days before Mbeki's retirement. While there are positives to the bill, overall it is an enormous blow to the scientific regulation of medicines in South Africa. The principal reason for this is that it replaces the fairly independent and internationally respected Medicines Control Council (don't judge an organization by its website) with the "South African Health Products Regulatory Authority" that, crucially, is "accountable to and reports to the Minister" (p. 3 of the above pdf). The Authority, in other words, is not independent of political interference. Specifically, while the Authority can "certify" a medical product (i.e. declare that it is safe, effective and so on [see p. 5]), the minister decides whether it is "in the public interest" to "register" it. Amazingly, the minister is to make this decision in terms of, amongst other things, "public health interests including national epidemiological trends", "economic interests in relation to health policies" and "whether the product is supportive of national health policy and goals in the long term" (p. 6). In other words, the minister can do as she damn well pleases. And, it seems, not only can a product be sold only if it is both certified and registered, the minister can authorize the sale of products which have not been certified or registered (p. 10 - 11). So, on the one hand, the Minister of Health can, by law, block access to treatments that are safe and effective, and, on the other, allow the sale of untested and possibly unsafe medical products. Again, the minister does what she wilt and South African patients will thus have to suffer what they must. (Sorry Thucydides). No wonder the Democratic Alliance and the AIDS Law Project together with the Treatment Action Campaign (pdf) opposed the legislation. (The TAC and AIDS Law Project's proposed amendments (pdf) were excellent but, alas, the bill's text actually became worse after their submission: compare the September 3rd text (pdf) to the official act's).

All of this means that we should be more happy than ever that Manto has been ousted. Imagine, if you can stomach it, the damage she could have done with this kind of authority. Imagine the quack remedies she would have authorized, contemplate the effective products she would have banned. While I certainly don't think any Minister of Health should have as much power as this amendment bill gives her, it's far better for Barbara Hogan to wield it than Manto. I really do hope Hogan turns out to be as good as advertized because, otherwise, we're in real trouble.

(More information on the new health minister, by the way, has become available. Wikipedians, bless their hearts, have already created a biography, and News24 has interviewed Hogan [mp3 here, via Irreverence].)

Good riddance

As all my South African and some of my foreign readers will know, South Africa is going through extraordinary political times. Thabo Mbeki, until recently our president, was ousted today after a titanic struggle with his former deputy, Jacob Zuma. I'm not going to comment on these developments (I try to keep politics out of this blog and, besides, I'm not sure I have anything substantive to say) but I will note that there is good news for skeptics amid the chaos. Kgalema Motlanthe, interim president until the election next year (when Zuma will almost certainly take over), today announced his cabinet and mercifully, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is no longer our Minister of Health! (Given that Motlanthe is a close Zuma ally, the cabinet is unlikely to change substantially after the election). So... good riddance. Manto was an unmitigated disaster as health minster, an international embarrassment and quite possibly an unsavory character to boot. First among her many sins was AIDS denialism: while countless people died from AIDS and millions more got infected, Manto did not content herself to sit idly by. No, she actively opposed effective science-based treatment. In the face of a pandemic, she eschewed proved treatments like anti-retrovirals, and advocated sheer quack remedies like eating beetroot, garlic and the African potato. While Mbeki has to shoulder a lot of blame for South Africa's disgraceful AIDS policies during the first part of this decade, there is plenty of blame left over for Manto.

Unfortunately, we're not rid of Manto completely, Motlanthe appointed her Minister in the Presidency. This move, alas, is something of a promotion: the position is a powerful one (occupied until recently by the influential Essop Pahad) and is very, very roughly the equivalent of the Chief of Staff in the American system. Of course, how much power Manto will yield depends on the president and we can only hope Motlanthe and later Zuma will ignore her quacking.

Manto's replacement, incidently, is Barbara Hogan, a struggle hero. I know little about her but Zackie Achmat, leader of the Treatment Action Campaign, has endorsed her enthusiastically. And that's good enough for me.

Note: I heard one political commentator describing Manto's move to the Presidency as a demotion. I'm no expert on the South African political system, so I'm not really in a position to disagree. As I noted above, thought, in presidential systems a minister's power depend less on her position in an organizational flow chart, and more on her relationship with (and influence on) the president. However, South Africa has a weird system whereby the president is elected by parlaiment, but then has presidential powers. What all this amounts to is hard to say...

Baby kissing (!?)

So I'm doing terrible, terrible grunt work at the moment: collecting suitable pictures of American political candidates so I can replicate Alexander Todorov's research with South African subjects for my masters research. Anyway, I'm browsing Flickr for a picture of Mark Warner (the Democratic Senatorial candidate in Virginia) when I come across this:


Politicians still kiss babies? Seriously!?!?

Orwell's "blog"

A growing trend is to take old (read: pre-Internet) diaries or letters and serialize them on a blog, usually on the same date a set number of years after they were written originally. WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier, for example, serializes the letters of a British soldier, Harry Lamin, 90 years after he wrote the originals. Now, The Orwell Prize has just started (on August 9th) serializing the great George Orwell's diaries on a blog 70 years after he wrote them.

One can, of course, read Orwell's diaries in book form, but I must say I find the idea of reading it in bite-sized chunks exactly 70 years later quite appealing.

Brooks channels Olson

NYT op-ed columnist David Brooks has a great article out today that applies Mancur Olson's insights to current problems in international relations. Olson wrote three brilliant and influential books - The Logic of Collective Action, The Rise and Decline of Nations and Power and Prosperity - that applied game theory and economic methodology more generally to social science questions. One of Olson's most important insights is that otherwise puzzling phenomena can be explained if we distinguish actors who have "encompassing interests" from those who have "narrow interests". Why is it, for example, that people overwhelmingly prefer autocracy to anarchy and lawlessness? Autocrats ('stationary bandits' as Olson calls them), after all, engage in regular theft (i.e. taxation), whereas 'roving bandits' (criminal bands that thrive under anarchy) engage only in irregular theft (i.e. raiding). The answer, as Olson showed brilliantly in Power and Prosperity, is that stationary bandits have an encompassing interest in the society they rule, whereas roving bandits have only a narrow stake. As a result, the rational autocrat only steals ('taxes') part of people's possessions and, amazingly, even invest in public goods, whereas roving bandits have no incentive to restrain themselves or produce public goods. Similar logic explains how special interest politics works: farm lobbies, for example, get all of the benefits of subsidies and tariff protection (direct income transfers, higher prices for their goods), but carry only a small part of the costs (higher taxes and food prices). Add Olson's insight from The Rise and Decline of Nations that small groups are far easier to organize than large groups (because of lower transaction costs) and can thus more readily influence policy, and we can see why many countries have protectionist agricultural policies despite the fact that they are deeply irrational overall.

Brooks takes these general insights and explains why the international community has repeatedly failed to implement policies that are overall in everyone's interest (like trade liberalization). Contrasting the current situation to the immediate post-war period, Brooks argues:

Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.

This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem.

...

Groups with a strong narrow interest are able to block larger groups with a diffuse but generalized interest. The narrow Chinese interest in Sudanese oil blocks the world’s general interest in preventing genocide. Iran’s narrow interest in nuclear weapons trumps the world’s general interest in preventing a Middle East arms race. Diplomacy goes asymmetric and the small defeat the large.

The current situation is indeed a 'tyranny of the minority' (in Olson's felicitous phrase) and a tragedy of the commons results as collective action on issues as diverse as global warming, trade liberalization, global security, environmental protection, space exploration and the protection of human rights falters.

So what to do? I agree with Brooks that John McCain's idea of a "League of Democracies" is a good start. Anomalies like 'rogue democracies' aside, liberal democracies (as defined by, say, Freedom House) have a lot of interests in common and, on Olson's logic, a subset of countries is much more likely to engage in successful collective action. Even if such a group is formed, however, vast problems will persist and national interests will be far from identical. I suspect, on current trends, that intergovernmental global governance will grow increasingly difficult, and thus supranational global governance will become increasingly necessary. But, of course, supranational institutions are exceedingly difficult to create and a global government is conceivable only in the very long run. The prospects for global collective action looks bleak for the foreseeable future.

(Brooks, by the way, has explicitly acknowledged he has been influenced by Olson, so I'm not reading too much into his column).

I, publish

My good friend David Ansara and I have an op-ed (pdf) in today's edition of Business Day. The article builds on my earlier blog pieces "Voting for authoritarianism" and "South Africa's shame". Our argument is that South Africa's foreign policy at the UN Security Council has been a travesty, richly earning us the appellation of 'rogue democracy'. Check it out!

Video: Andy Thompson on suicide terrorism

Andy Thompson gave an absolutely superb and erudite talk about suicide terrorism at the 2007 Atheist Alliance International Conference. In his lecture, Thompson convincingly uses evolutionary psychology to explain the psychological mechanisms responsible for the occurrence of violence generally and suicide terrorism specifically. The first part of the talk is embedded below (or click here); alternatively you can download the video in .mov format here.

South Africa's shame

This isn't a politics blog, but I've argued before that South Africa's participation on the UN Security Council is brining shame to the country, that it amounts to "Voting for Authoritarianism". On that occasion, I condemned the South African government for voting with Russia and China against a draft resolution that would have censured Burma over its human rights abuses. Now South Africa has again sided with a bunch of autocracies (China, Libya, Russia and Vietnam) by voting against a resolution (pdf) on Zimbabwe that would have, among other things, (a) condemned the regime for stealing the recent election, (b) called for a return to democracy, (c) imposed an arms embargo and (d) placed targeted sanctions on the upper echelons of the government. Just like on the Burma vote, South Africa is the only liberal democracy that voted against the resolution. (Indonesia, which is also a democracy, abstained on both votes).

The minutes (pdf) of the meeting make it clear that the South African government is taking a ridiculously procedural view of matters. South Africa's ambassador to the UN, Dumisani Kumalo, argued that while government was worried about the situation in Zimbabwe, South Africa is obliged to follow the African consensus as expressed by SADC and the AU. And SADC and the AU did not call for sanctions, simply expressed "grave concern". Kumalo went on to say "dialog" between the ruling ZANU-PF and the opposition MDC parties is the only way the problem can be addressed.

While I have not been a critic of "quiet diplomacy" in the past (because the alternative policy options looked worse), it's clear things have changed: the Zimbabwean government has absolutely no legitimacy left and it has taken electoral fraud, violence and political intimidation to new heights. It is also clear that Mugabe will never give up power voluntarily and negotiations are doomed to failure as a result unless outside pressure is put on the regime. The argument that South Africa is oblidged to follow African consensus is a transparent excuse and belied by the fact that tiny Burkina Faso managed to vote for the resolution.

Thomas Friedman is perfectly right, I think, to argue South Africa, Russia and China may be popular, but they are spineless.

Update: the UN document handling system seems to be deeply silly, so the links to the draft resolution and the minutes might not work. Have a look at this page, and search for "Peace and security--Africa (Zimbabwe)" to find the relevant documents.

Freedom to blog

This isn't a political blog, but I've written about freedom of expression before and as a blogger, I care quite a bit about the freedom to blog. So I find it deeply upsetting that in numerous countries bloggers are in fact in jail for airing their opinions. As an article in this week's Economist explains:

Security officials who once scoffed at blogs, or ignored them completely in favour of bigger and more conspicuous targets, are now bringing their legal and other arsenals to bear. A common move is to expand media, information and electoral laws to include blogs. Last year, for example, Uzbekistan changed its media law to count all websites as “mass media”—a category subject to Draconian restriction. Belarus now requires owners of internet cafés to keep a log of all websites that their customers visit: in a country where internet access at home is still rare and costly, that is a big hurdle for the active netizen. Earlier this year Indonesia passed a law that made it much riskier to publish controversial opinions online. A Brazilian court has ruled that bloggers, like other media, must abide by restrictions imposed by the law on elections.

The chilling effect of such moves is intensified when governments back them up with imprisonment. From Egypt to Malaysia to Saudi Arabia to Singapore, bloggers have in recent months found themselves behind bars for posting materials that those in power dislike. The most recent Worldwide Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, a lobby group, estimates their number at a minimum of 64.

For those of you who haven't read it, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty provides an overwhelmingly strong case for freedom of expression. As Mill put it:

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

This is your brain on nonsense

Remember that idiotic NYT editorial from November last year that claimed fMRI scans of swing voters' brains could be used to read their minds? Well, the same company that pulled off that stunt is back with an equally egregious piece in The Atlantic. Slate's Daniel Engber is suitably skeptical, accusing the company of "neuropunditry":

The neuropundits are more like tarot readers than scientists: They claim to read specific mental states from patterns of blood flow and brain activity, but the narratives they invent are arbitrary, equivocal, and inconsistent. And whenever the imaging data happen to contradict reality, they change their interpretation without a second thought.

Indeed. Another example of cognitive neuroscience gone badly awry...

Link love: Dave's new blog

My good friend David Ansara has just started a blog, entitled Quid Pro Quo, on politics and the media in South Africa. Dave is an intelligent and knowledgeable guy who has just finished his masters degree in South African and comparative politics at the University of Cape Town. His blog looks very promising - check it out!

Crazy Kanazawa

I mentioned a while ago that LSE evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa recently launched a blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist. I was quite excited about this - there are a dearth of evolutionary psychology blogs, so I thought it was great an up and coming researcher was taking on the blogosphere. Kanazawa, however, is worrying me a bit...

In his very first post, "If the truth offends, it’s our job to offend", he defended the laudable notion that scientists should follow the evidence wherever it may lead. He took it a bit far for my liking though, by arguing scientists should never think about the consequences of their research. Said Kanazawa, "Scientists are not responsible for the potential or actual consequences of the knowledge they create." Really? If a physicist's experiment might, say, create a black hole and destroy the earth, should she ignore this possibility? Were the Manhattan Project scientists wrong to worry about igniting the atmosphere (pdf)? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for PC-bashing, academic freedom and following the evidence where it leads, but the notion that scientists should never consider the consequences of their research is absurd. Bacon was right: knowledge is power. But it's not necessarily or always a power for good. In some cases - the extreme ones - scientists should most certainly consider this.

The above, however, is pretty minor compared to Kanazawa's latest post, "Why we are losing this war". Why is it, he asks, that WWI and WWII lasted only four years but the "war on terror" has lasted seven years, with no end in sight? (Ignore for the moment the fact that, by any reasonable definition, WWII lasted six years, not four). Why is it that the West did not quickly defeat enemies who are much poorer, less well-equipped, and comparatively technologically backward? Kanazawa answers:

It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire... We may be losing this war because our enemies have a full range of human emotions while we don’t.

This is an interesting theory, and it could be right, but it's not clear to me why Kanazawa highlights this single factor. Firstly, he doesn't seem to have enough evidence to argue this is the only or even most important variable. Where are his citations to rigorous academic research demonstrating his 'hate theory' is anything more than only vaguely inspired by evolutionary considerations, anything but feral speculation? Secondly, the war on terror is asymmetric and regular armies have always had trouble with enemies who employ terrorist and guerrilla tactics, no matter how much they hated them. Thirdly, it's unclear whether the war on terror really qualifies as a "war" in the traditional sense and can thus be settled by military means. Lastly, there is a much better argument for why powerful countries lose wars against less capable enemies: Andrew Mack (1975)'s application of the life-dinner principle to international politics. Mack argued that when powerful countries, like the United States, are defeated by weak ones, like Vietnam, it is not because of the 'insurgents' military victory on the ground', but because of "the progressive attrition of their opponents' political capability to wage war" (1975: 177). That is, relatively weak enemies win exactly because they are weak, because the conflict is asymmetric: weak enemies do not pose an existential risk to their opponents, but powerful ones do. Consequently, the war is necessarily "total" for the weak and "limited" for the powerful. (That's where the life-dinner principle comes in: why does the hare run faster than the hound? Because the hare is running for its life, but the hound merely for its dinner). There are, I admit, a number of wrinkles here (most importantly, terrorists may pose an existential risk if they acquire weapons of mass destruction and it could be that people only hate powerful enemies) but I'll skip over these and ask the concerned reader to look at Mack's paper (who addresses a number of potential concerns that might arise).

The real reason I'm worried about Kanazawa, however, only emerges in the second to last paragraph, when he writes:

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

The above, to be sure, is somewhat ambiguous. It could be that what he's saying is that, were Coulter president, she would have hated her new-found enemies appropriately, nuked the Middle East and thus "won" the war on terror in a day. But it could be that Kanazawa doesn't think that would have been a good idea, it could be that he's simply arguing hypothetically without endorsing that course of action. And yet... it really doesn't read that way. The tone, the context, and the register all suggest to me that Kanazawa would have approved of a nuclear response to 9/11. And this, I submit, is a little extreme. Forget for the moment that killing millions of innocent people is a Bad Thing, forget that the Middle East contains a good proportion of the world's oil, forget that America's democratic ally Israel is in the Middle East, forget that the fall-out would do extensive damage to other parts of the world, forget that there are tens of thousands of Americans (and far more other foreigners) living in the area, forget that the environmental damage would be enormous, forget that the Middle East contains innumerable priceless cultural artifacts, forget that there are hundreds of millions of Muslims living outside the Middle East (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc.), and forget that 9/11 was planned from Afghanistan, outside the Middle East. Have you forgotten all of these factors (and any others you came up with for yourself)? Good. Now it's a good idea to nuke the entire Middle East. Now only does it make any sense whatsoever to call the hypothetical nuclear destruction of the entire Middle East a "victory" for America.

Kanazawa ends his article with, "Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running." I agree this too is somewhat ambiguous, but, wow, he really seems to be saying Ann Coulter would make a better president than Hillary Clinton. Coulter, for those of you who don't know, is a batshit crazy, deeply uninformed Creationist, extreme right-wing, fundamentalist Christian. (Have a look at her website or her page on Wikiquote). I find it hard to think of someone who would be a worse president.

Unless I have been uncharitable, unless I have misrepresented his position, and unless he was joking, Kanazawa is crazy. Frankly, he gives evolutionary psychology a bad name by associating it with this kind of extremism. Evolutionary psychologists are not the heartless right-wingers they're sometimes characterized as being (Tybur, Miller & Gangestad, 2007), but Kanazawa is hardly helping to combat that erroneous perception with posts like these.

References

Mack, A. (1975) "Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict," World Politics, 27(2): 175-200.

Tybur, J. M., Miller, G. F., & Gangestad, S. W. (2007) "Testing the controversy: An empirical examination of adaptationists' attitudes towards politics and science," Human Nature, 18(4): 313-328.

Voting for authoritarianism

This is the last Facebook note I'm reposting here. It might not be of particularly wide interest, but I think the piece is pretty good. I wrote it at the beginning of 2007 when I got angry at one of South Africa's votes at the United Nations Security Council.

In its first major action since being elected to the United Nations Security Council, on January 12th [2007] South Africa voted with Russia and China against a draft Security Council (SC) resolution that censured Burmaⁱ over its continued human rights abuses and called for democratic reform. (Among other issues, see the draft’s full text). Obviously, since both China and Russia wield vetoes, South Africa’s vote was technically moot, but this action bodes ill for both our international reputation and for a clear-headed pro-democratic foreign policy.

Background
After gaining independence from Britain in 1948, Burma had a fairly democratic governance system until Ne Win led a military coup d’etat, became dictator and introduced a disastrous set of policies called the “Burmese Way to Socialism". Pro-democratic protests and unrest sporadically erupted from the 1970s onwards (particularly after U Thant’s funeral in 1974), culminating in the 8888 Uprising in 1988 which was brutally suppressed by the military after a second coup. Quite possibly due to pressures created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1990 free and fair legislative elections were held which the National League of Democracy (NLD) won overwhelmingly, taking 392 out of 492 seats (369 more than its closest competitor – full results here). Sadly, the military refused to accept the outcome of the election, placed the NLD’s leader – the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi – under house arrest and continued both with its irrational economic policies that have impoverished the country and with serious human rights abuses.

The resolution and the vote
As noted above, the draft resolution censured Burma’s junta for continued human rights abuses, called on the military to cease its attacks on ethnic minorities (including widespread rape and sexual violence), and urged the government to initiate political dialogue with the NLD.

Of the 15 members of the SC, 3 voted against (SA, Russia & China), 3 abstained (Congo-Brazzaville, Indonesia & Qatar) whilst the remaining 9 (Belgium, Ghana, Italy, Panama, Peru, Slovakia, UK, US and France) voted for. Shockingly, South Africa is the only liberal democracy that voted against the resolution (Indonesia, who abstained, is also a democracy). While Russia and China’s no votes were expected (they fear setting precedents that could be used against their own regimes or against their authoritarian allies), South Africa’s vote was utterly baffling. According to the South Africa’s representative, Dumisani Kumalo, government is extremely concerned about the situation in Burma but had three reasons for its position: adopting the resolution (1) would compromise the work of the Secretary General’s envoy to Burma, (2) dealt with issues best left to the Human Rights Council (HRC) and (3) did not fit the mandate given to the SC by the UN Charter.

Analysis
It seems clear to me all three arguments South Africa offered to justify its position are bunk or, at the very least, reasons for abstaining, not for opposing.

The first argument is, in effect, a defense of “quiet diplomacy" – something there is good reason to believe doesn’t work. It’s a basic principle of the theory of games as applied to negotiations that mere talking, by itself, rarely produces desirable outcomes if the real world incentives of the parties involved are not changed somehow. Dictatorial governments very rarely (or never) give up power voluntarily; the idea, therefore, that the UN Secretary General (or his envoy) can talk “sense into" the junta and convince them to open negotiations with the NLD is naïve at best.

The second argument, though perfectly correct in a narrowly legalistic sense, fails on two counts: firstly, the HRC has almost no power whatsoever (so it’s a talking shop, nothing more) and, secondly, its structure is inherently flawed. Though the HRC is something of an improvement over its immediate predecessor, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, a large number of countries on the council have poor human rights records themselves, including China, Pakistan, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia and others. (See the full list). Thankfully, liberal democracies have a slight majority (~54%), but non-democracies, and countries with a strong agenda to discourage the protection human rights (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.), nonetheless have an important say on the Council, especially with the decline of America’s soft power. In short, referring a case like this to the HRC is the international equivalent of “killing legislation in committee".

The third argument is arguably the most powerful – there is certainly something to this position – but I still think it fails to justify SA’s vote. Firstly, both the UK and the US made strong arguments that Burma’s domestic problems have important regional security consequences. Narcotics and human trafficking, millions of refugees, the radicalization of minority groups (leading to the adoption of terror tactics), and the political instability of Burma are serious regional, and perhaps even global, security concerns. Secondly, from the mid-1990s there has been a growing consensus that the world’s nations have a collective responsibility towards oppressed peoples. As Kofi Annan put it eloquently in his final speech in office:

[Collective responsibility] also includes our shared responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity – a responsibility solemnly accepted by all nations at last year's UN summit. That means that respect for national sovereignty can no longer be used as a shield by governments intent on massacring their own people, or as an excuse for the rest of us to do nothing when such heinous crimes are committed.

The idea that national sovereignty – adopted as a governing principle of international relations for purely pragmatic reasons at the Treaty of Westphalia – is some sort of grand, unbreakable moral principle is patently absurd. South Africa should not pretend governments have the right to slaughter their own population if they feel like it. Indeed, it’s somewhat ironic that the ANC, who benefited from South Africa’s isolation over the purely sovereign issue of Apartheid, would adopt a reactionary position with respect to the right to freedom of other peoples. Moreover, even ignoring the above considerations, the narrowly legalistic interpretation that the SC can only do what the Charter says it can is itself incoherent. There is an important sense in which there just is no such thing as international law (for states, there manifestly is international law for individuals) – consequently, the SC, not the Charter, is sovereign. If this is right, then there is no reason whatsoever for South Africa not to support resolutions like these – unless, of course, our foreign policy is to be dictated by old-style Resistance loyalties or if the content of the resolution is being objected to.

Note
i. Burma officially changed its name to the Union of Myanmar in 1989, but since the regime that changed the name is illegitimate, many nations don’t recognize the emendation. (Much like Mabutu Sese Seko’s attempt to rename the DRC “Zaire" was widely unrecognized). See Explanation of the names of Burma/Myanmar for further information.

Your brain on politics: the bad and the better

The bad

A disturbingly bad article, entitled "This is Your Brain on Politics", appeared recently in the New York Times. It presented purported "research" about the brains of swing voters in the 2008 US Presidential Elections but, unfortunately, the article does little but illustrate the dangers of circumventing the peer-review process and the shocking state of science journalism in the mainstream media. Luckily, the NYT published an angry letter by a group of cognitive neuroscientists condemning the article and the blogosphere responded forcefully, among the blogs that attacked the piece were: Bad Science, Neurocritic, Mindhacks, Brainethics and Natural Rationality. Subsequently, Nature published an editorial also condemning the article and even Slate joined in.

The better

Thankfully there has also been some better recent research concerning 'the brain on politics' and good media coverage thereof to boot. The subject of last week's edition of ABC Radio National's fantastic radio show/podcast, All in the Mind, was "The Political Brain" and the show discussed, among other things, an interesting study in Nature Neuroscience entitled "Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism" (see also the supplementary materials). The study, led by NYU assistant professor of psychology David Amodio, evoked considerable interest and was widely discussed by the science blogging community. (See links below). I suspect the study has been somewhat misunderstood, so, despite it being stale by web standards, I'll look at it in some detail.

The hypothesis the authors defend is that political orientation (conservative vs. liberal) is "associated with individual differences in a basic neurocognitive mechanism involved broadly in self-regulation" (Amodio et. al., 2007: 1246). They go about testing this proposition in a somewhat tortuous way: previous research had shown that conservatives are "more structured and persistent in their judgments and approaches to decision-making" whereas liberals "report higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and greater openness to new experiences". Other research showed that psychological differences between liberals and conservatives "map onto the... self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring" (the system that detects a mismatch between habitual responses and the response required in the current situation) which in turn has been "associated with neurocognitive activity in the anterior cingulate cortext"(ACC). So, to test whether liberals and conservatives differ in their patterns of self-regulation, the authors measured the acitivity of the ACC in a situation requiring conflict-monitoring.

Amodio et. al. conducted this test by using an electroencephalogram to record the ACC activity in 43 subjects who were asked to complete a go/no-go association task (Nosek & Banaji, 2001). For the task, participants were placed in a sound-proof room, in front of a computer screen in the center of which either an "M" or a "W" appeared. Half the subjects were instructed to "go" (i.e. hit a key) when they saw an "M" and do nothing ("no-go") when they saw a "W", while the other half were asked to do the opposite. The task consisted of 500 trails, 80% of which consisted of the "go" stimulus and 20% of the "no-go" stimulus. This meant that for half the subjects "M" became a habitual response (which needed to be inhibited when they saw a "W") and for the other half "W" became habitual (which needed to be inhibited when they saw an "M"). Additionally, before the task was administered, subjects reported their political attitudes confidentially on a scale ranging from -5 (very liberal) to +5 (very conservative).

The results were very suggestive. Firstly, however, it is important to note that there are in fact two types of finding in this study: the behavioral findings (which the authors do not focus on) and the cognitive neuroscience findings (which the authors emphasized and most of the subsequent discussion revolved around). The behavioral finding - which is interesting all by itself - is that liberals were more accurate than conservatives on the no-go trails (r(41) = 0.30, P less than 0.05) which "suggests that a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change".

The neurocognitive findings were (among other things) that the response-locked error-related negativity (ERN) - a measure of conflict between a habitual tendency and an alternative - was strongly correlated (r(41) = 0.59, P less than 0.001) with political attitudes:

Additionally, liberalism was strongly associated with greater conflict-related neural activity when a habitual response had to be inhibited:

Subsequently, localization analysis was performed, which confirmed that the above mentioned ERN activity originated from the ACC. Amodio et. al. conclude that "taken together, our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanisms related to cognitive control and self regulation".

A couple of observations. The study is clearly preliminary and a good deal of the reporting of it in the lay press went far beyond the evidence. The authors, however, obviously cannot be blamed for this - they were careful not to stray from the evidence in their paper. Furthermore, only 43 subjects took part in the study and, worse, only 7 of those self-reported as conservative. The findings would have to be replicated by a different team in a different part in the US with a larger number of participants before too much stock can be placed in them. For now this can be filed under "interesting and suggestive but preliminary". We'll have to wait and see how the literature develops.

Links

• Coverage of the Amodio paper on other blogs: NeuroLogica, Cognitive Daily, Natural Rationality, Crooked Timber, Mixing Memory, and Neurocritic.
• News coverage: Scientific American.
  

Bibliography

Amodio, D.A., Jost, J.T., Master, S.L., Yee, C.M. (2007). Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 1246-1247. DOI: 10.1038/nn1979

Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2001) "The go/no-go association task," Social Cognition, 19(6): 161-176.