Well, with the first post and a response to criticisms out of the way, I'll conclude with the graphs on some ideas that are gaining in popularity in the study of mankind. Where it says "social sciences," I've only searched JSTOR for the following journal categories: anthropology, economics, education, political science, psychology, and sociology. The social sciences, basically. (And I've used appropriate neutral comparisons as before.) The reason is that if "heritability" increases in usage, that could be due to its use in genetics -- I want to see how popular it is when talking about humans. (As before, graphs have simple titles, while the full search terms are listed in an Appendix.)










Contrary to what you might think, since about 1950 academics have become increasingly interested in the genetic influence on human nature, reversing a period of decline from roughly 1930 to 1950. There is also an apparent cyclical pattern on top of the increasing trend. Just make sure you refer to the heritability of "cognitive ability" rather than of "IQ" (see below).

I've broken up the graphs on Darwin in the social sciences to make the trends clearer. There is an early phase in Victorian times when Darwin's thoughts were everywhere, especially in discussing human beings. Around the turn of the century, his ideas become less popular, as mentioned above. Around 1940, when his ideas come back due to the modern synthesis in biology, they become more popular in the social sciences as well. Indeed, since the mid-1940s, his ideas have only become more important to social scientists -- whether they like it or not.

Notice that while "IQ" goes through cycles about an increasing trend, its synonym "cognitive ability" shows exponential increase. I assume that this is because "cognitive ability" is not a politicized term, while "IQ" is, resulting in outbreaks of hysteria where many more people of any ideological background begin talking a lot about it.

The same is true of "sociobiology," which Leftist academics such as the Sociobiology Study Group tainted with negative political associations, compared to its synonym "evolutionary psychology." Now, someone will say that evolutionary psychology is different -- that it studies the mental, psychological processes rather than just observed behavior. But that's nonsense -- if you've read one of the many evolutionary psychology articles about digit ratios, waist-to-hip ratios, whether the female orgasm is adaptive, and so on, you know that mental processes and cognitive science models rarely come up, except in the study of vision.

Indeed, "evolutionary psychology" increases at just the time when "sociobiology" decreases, in the mid-1980s, showing that the former is simply replacing the latter as the preferred term.

As further evidence that a decline in usage means a decline in popularity, "evolutionary psychology" gets lots of hits in the 1890s when pioneers of psychology like William James were obsessed with integrating evolution and the study of the human mind, and takes a nosedive and lies dead once behaviorism takes over in psychology around the 1920s.

Because "evolutionary psychology" and "cognitive ability" are safe terms politically, these are the obvious choices for people who don't want to have water poured over their head at a conference -- and the data show this rational choice. Interest has continued to skyrocket, although people use different codewords. Nothing like this turned up in the first post because it is not political suicide to talk about postmodernism or Marxism in academia -- but just try bringing up "IQ". It is fascinating that academics can adhere to the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin and be taken seriously, while anyone who would do so for the ideas of Mussolini or Hitler would be made a total pariah. I wouldn't take either numbskull seriously, but most educated people will, perhaps grudgingly, give a free pass to those who revere the ideological or political figures associated with The Other Great Dictatorships and Mass Murders.

I've already made general observations in the first post, and they carry over here, especially the fact that the history of ideas seems so unaffected by the history of the entire outside world -- one more idea that Marx got wrong. There is clearly change, struggle between groups, and so on, but they are largely internal to academia. The future -- or the near-future anyway -- looks pretty bright for those interested in the biological approach to studying humans and their ways, and who believe things like IQ are important. Any students who are still considering the social constructionist, Marxist, feminist, or Whateverist approach should at least learn the new theories, if for no other reason than to be employable in 5 to 10 years. Hell, you might even consider it a kind of Pascal's Wager.

APPENDIX

Here are the search terms I used, once again searching the full text of articles and reviews:

"cognitive ability" OR "cognitive abilities"

"darwin*" NOT "social darwinism" NOT "social darwinist" NOT "social darwinists"

"evolutionary psychology" OR "evolutionary psychologist" OR "evolutionary psychologists"

"heritability" OR "heritable"

"IQ"

"sociobiolog*"

Labels: culture, intellectual history

My first post detailed the demise of wooly-headed theories in academia. In this post, I'll also address some common criticisms that have come up so far. In the third post, just above this one, I will look at a rival class of theories, namely the scientific and in particular biological approaches to studying humanity. The take-home message is that, while the Blank Slate theories are slowly being driven out of academia, new ones based on the biological sciences are becoming ever more popular. But let's start with the criticisms:

1) You're confusing popularity with accuracy, truth, etc.

I never said anything to this effect. I am just interested in whether certain theories are becoming more or less prevalent. Now, I happen to believe that in the case of, say, psychoanalysis or Marxism, the theories are becoming less popular because people realize that they're not very insightful. And certainly what I think is a great theory could become unfashionable for whatever reason. Whether you're celebrating or mourning the death of some theory, I don't care -- I just want to show whether it is or is not dying.

2) You didn't account for the lag between when an article is published and when it is archived in JSTOR.

I did do that, but I was only explicit about it in the comments to the first post. Journals in JSTOR have a "moving wall" between original and archived dates, with most having a lag of 3 to 5 years. Here is the distribution of lag times. By excluding data from 2003 onward, I've taken care of 88% of journals. And I don't want to hear a non-quantitative objection that "the remainder could be affecting the results" -- tell me what you think the data-point should be for, say 2001, and then derive how large of an effect the 12% of journals would have to have in order to get that value. We'll see how reasonable that sounds. Moreover, since no moving wall is greater than 10 years, any decline that started before 1998 is not subject to even this vague objection -- for example, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis.

3) You don't have a neutral control case to show that Marxism is "really" decreasing in popularity.

I did admit in the first post that ideally we'd have the total number of articles that JSTOR has for a given year, and that we'd divide the number of articles with Marxism by the total number of articles to get a frequency or prevalence. We can estimate the total by searching for articles with some highly frequent word, such as "the", so that the number returned is very close to the total. For "the", this approach is almost guaranteed to work, since almost no article would slip through the net.

However, JSTOR has a list of highly frequent words that it doesn't allow. Still, not all common words are blocked. I consulted a frequency list compiled by Oxford Online, and chose the highest-ranking words there which are not blocked by JSTOR, though I excluded the personal pronouns and "people," since I don't expect those to show up much in hard science or social science journals. This gives the variants of "time," "know," "good," and "look."

So, I've estimated the total number of articles for a year by searching for "time" OR "know*" OR "good*" OR "look*", where the asterisk means the word-ending can vary. How closely this estimates the true total is not of interest -- the point is that it serves as a common, neutral yardstick to measure the change from one year to the next.

Interestingly, using this control has almost no effect on the shape of the graphs from the first post. That is because the increase in the total number of articles increases only linearly from about 1940 onward, whereas the articles on postmodernism increase or decrease exponentially -- and an exponential divided by a linear is still growing or dying very fast. I've redrawn the original graphs and posted them here because it's easier for me; sometime soon, I'll substitute them into the first post for the record.

The only change I make to my original observations is that social constructionism is not so obviously declining anymore, although it is plateauing and apparently declining since 1998. If I had to guess about its behavior after 2002, I would say it's downward simply because none of the other theories plateaued for very long -- they quickly hit a peak and declined, so a steady high value does not appear to be stable for such theories.

4) You're mistaking a decline in usage with a decline in belief -- once the idea becomes taken for granted, practitioners stop referring to it explicitly.

Just on an intuitive level, we know this is horseshit -- do physicists not use the words "gravity" or "electricity" anymore, or no longer refer to Newton? This objection exemplifies the problem with the average arts and humanities major: he is content to build a logically coherent argument without doing a quick reality check for its explanatory plausibility. I guess that's why they end up in law firms.

But to provide evidence that usage tracks belief, here are some graphs for hard science keywords. In the case of Darwin, I excluded articles on "social Darwinism," which appears to be a, er, social construction in academia. See here. I have data on academic scarewords like "biological determinism," and perhaps in a future post I'll show those. Right now, I want to focus on articles that are at least somewhat level-headed. For ease of inspection, I've given each graph a simple title, and list the search terms at the end of this post in an Appendix.






As the disciplines of population genetics and sociobiology have become staples of biology, mentioning them by name has not declined -- just the opposite. Because they are such thriving fields, writing about them explicitly has shot up. Darwin's thoughts were immensely popular in Victorian times, but they languished because no one could tell how to unite them with the study of heredity. That was, until the modern evolutionary synthesis, which began in the late 1930s -- since then, interest has exploded. The same goes for Mendel's thoughts -- no one knew what the physical basis for his "gene" idea was, until the relationship between the genetic code and DNA was laid out in the late 1950s.

This shows that even hard science ideas can rise and fall and rise again, in these cases probably because some key aspect was found unsatisfying, until a later discovery fixed the problem, allowing the idea to become popular again. So there's hope for the unemployed psychoanalyst yet, assuming he can stick around for a half-century.

APPENDIX

Here are the search terms I used:

"population genetic" OR "population genetics" OR "genetics of populations"

"sociobiolog*"

"darwin*" NOT "social darwinism" NOT "social darwinist" NOT "social darwinists"

"mendel" OR "mendelian*" OR "mendelis*" NOT "mendelss*"

I put the last restriction on the Mendel search because I got a lot of results about the composer Felix Mendelssohn.

As with the first post, I searched the full text for both articles and reviews.

Labels: culture, intellectual history

It's up, How Jews Became Smart: Anti-"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" (big PDF). The long-awaited rebuttal to the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.

Labels: culture

[Note: I'm rushing this out before the school week starts, as I need sleep, so if it seems unedited, that's why.]

We are living in very exciting times -- at long last, we've broken the stranglehold that a variety of silly Blank Slate theories have held on the arts, humanities, and social sciences. To some, this may sound strange, but things have decisively changed within the past 10 years, and these so-called theories are now moribund. To let those out-of-the-loop in on the news, and to quantify what insiders have already suspected, I've drawn graphs of the rise and fall of these fashions.

I searched the archives of JSTOR, which houses a cornucopia of academic journals, for certain keywords that appear in the full text of an article or review (since sometimes the big ideas appear in books rather than journals). This provides an estimate of how popular the idea is -- not only the true believers, but their opponents too, will use the term. Once no one believes it anymore, then the adherents, opponents, and neutral spectators will have less occasion to use the term. I excluded data from 2003 onward because most JSTOR journals don't deposit their articles in JSTOR until 3 to 5 years after the original publication. Still, most of the declines are visible even as of 2002.

Admittedly, a better estimate would be to measure the number of articles with the term in a given year, divided by the total number of articles that JSTOR has for that year, to yield a frequency. But I don't have the data on total articles. However, on time-scales when we don't expect a huge change in the total number of articles published -- say, over a few decades -- then we can take the total to be approximately constant and use only the raw counts of articles with the keyword. Crucially, although this may warp our view of an increasing trend -- which could be due to more articles being written in total, while the frequency of those of interest stays the same -- a sustained decline must be real.

Here are the graphs (an asterisk means the word endings could vary):













Some thoughts:

First, there are two exceptions to the overall pattern of decline -- orientalism and post-colonialism. The former may be declining, but it's hard to say one way or the other. The latter, though, was holding steady in 2002, although its growth rate had clearly slowed down, so its demise seems to be only a matter of time -- by 2010 at the latest, it should show a down-turn.

Second, aside from Marxism, which peaked in 1988, and social constructionism, which declined starting in 2002 *, the others began to fall from roughly 1993 to 1998. It is astonishing that such a narrow time frame saw the fall of fashions that varied so much in when they were founded. Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism are very old compared to deconstruction or postmodernism, yet it was as though during the 1990s an academia-wide clean-up swept away all the bullshit, no matter how long it had been festering there.

If we wanted to model this, we would probably use an S-I-R type model for the spread of infectious diseases. But we'd have to include an exogenous shock sometime during the 1990s since it's unlikely that epidemics that had begun 100 years apart would, of their own inner workings, decline at the same time. It's as if we started to live in sparser population densities, where diseases old and new could not spread so easily, or if we wandered onto an antibiotic that cured of us diseases, some of which had plagued us for much longer than others.

Third, notice how simple most of the curves look -- few show lots of noise, or the presence of smaller-scale cycles. That's despite the vicissitudes of politics, economics, and other social changes -- hardly any of it made an impact on the world of ideas. I guess they don't call it the Ivory Tower for nothing. About the only case you could make is for McCarthyism halting the growth of Marxist ideas during most of the 1950s. The fall of the Berlin Wall does not explain why Marxism declined then -- its growth rate was already grinding to a halt for the previous decade, compared to its explosion during the 1960s and '70s.

Still, it could be that there was a general anti-communist zeitgeist in the 1950s, so that academics would have cooled off to Marxism of their own accord, not because they were afraid of McCarthy or whoever else. Importantly, that's only one plausible link -- there are a billion others that don't pan out, so it may be that our plausible link happened due to chance: when you test 1000 correlations, 5 of them will be significant at the 0.005 level, even though they're only the result of chance.

This suggests that a "great man theory" of intellectual history is wrong. Surely someone needs to invent the theory, and it may be complex enough that if that person hadn't existed, the theory wouldn't have existed (contra the view that somebody or other would've invented Marxism). After that, though, we write a system of differential equations to model the dynamics of the classes of individuals involved -- perhaps just two, believers and non-believers -- and these interactions between individuals are all that matter. How many persuasive tracts were there against postmodernism or Marxism, for example? And yet none of those convinced the believers since the time wasn't right. Postmodernism was already growing at a slower rate in 1995 when the Sokal Affair put its silliness in the spotlight, and even then its growth rate didn't decline even faster as a result. Kind of depressing for iconoclasts -- but at least you can rest assured that at some point, the fuckers will get theirs.

Fourth, the sudden decline of all the big-shot theories you'd study in a literary theory or critical theory class is certainly behind the recent angst of arts and humanities grad students. Without a big theory, you can't pretend you have specialized training and shouldn't be treated as such -- high school English teachers may be fine with that, but if you're in grad school, that's admitting you failed as an academic. You want a good reputation. Isn't it strange, though, that no replacement theories have filled the void? That's because everyone now understands that the whole thing was a big joke, and aren't going to be suckered again anytime soon. Now the generalizing and biological approaches to the humanities and social sciences are dominant -- but that's for another post.

Also, as you sense all of the big theories are dying, you must realize that you have no future: you'll be increasingly unable to publish articles -- or have others cite you -- and even if you became a professor, you wouldn't be able to recruit grad students into your pyramid scheme, or enroll students in your classes, since their interest would be even lower than among current students. Someone who knows more about intellectual history should compare arts and humanities grad students today to the priestly caste that was becoming obsolete as Europe became more rational and secular. I'm sure they rationalized their angst as a spiritual or intellectual crisis, just like today's grad students might say that they had an epiphany -- but in reality, they're just recognizing how bleak their economic prospects are and are opting for greener pastures.

Fifth and last, I don't know about the rest of you, but I find young people today very refreshing. Let's look at 18 year-olds -- the impressionable college freshmen, who could be infected by their dopey professors. If they begin freshman year just 1 year after the theory's peak, the idea is still very popular, so they'll get infected. If we allow, say 5 years of cooling off and decay, professors won't talk about it so much, or will be use a less strident tone of voice, so that only the students who were destined to latch on to some stupid theory will get infected. Depending on the trend, this makes the safe cohort born in 1975 at the oldest (for Marxism), or 1989 at the youngest (for social constructionism). And obviously even among safe cohorts, some are safer than others -- people my age (27) may not go in for Marxism much, but have heard of it or taken it seriously at some point (even if to argue against it intellectually). But 18 year-olds today weren't even born when Marxism had already started to die.

It's easy to fossilize your picture of the world from your formative years of 15 to 24, but things change. If you turned off the radio in the mid-late '90s, you missed four years of great rock and rap music that came out from 2003 to 2006 (although now you can keep it off again). If you write off dating a 21 year-old grad student on the assumption that they're mostly angry feminist hags, you're missing out. And if you'd rather socialize with people your own age because younger people are too immature to have an intelligent discussion -- ask yourself when the last time was that you didn't have to dance around all kinds of topics with Gen-X or Baby Boomer peers because of the moronic beliefs they've been infected with since their young adult years? Try talking to a college student about human evolution -- they're pretty open-minded. My almost-30 housemate, by comparison, was eager to hear that what I'm studying would show that there's no master race after all. What a loser.

* I started the graph of social constructionism at 1960, even though it extends back to 1876, since it was always at a very low level before then (less than 5 per year, often 0). Including these points didn't make the recent decline so apparent in the graph, so out they went.

Labels: culture, intellectual history

Young and Arab in Land of Mosques and Bars is an article about a few young Egyptian men who moved to Dubai and how it changed them. The piece is an illustration of a very narrow slice of Dubai life; after all most young men in the city are not Arab, but South Asian (Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, etc.). Nevertheless, there are particular points which align with broader trends which we have discussed on this weblog. For example:

This economically vital, socially freewheeling yet unmistakably Muslim state has had a transforming effect on young men. Religion has become more of a personal choice and Islam less of a common bond than national identity.

I have already mentioned several times the cross-cultural sex differences in religiosity. The article makes it clear that freedom and choice result in a drifting away of many young men from traditional religious norms. Not all of course. I believe that the "traditional" institutions which have constrained, channeled and sometimes altered species-typical urges and biases are features of the Post-Neolithic mass society. These mass societies, what we term "civilizations," are characterized by powerful male packs who generate within group cohesion by reducing internal variance in norms, behavior and symbolic markers. The variation is to some extent generated by genetic variation (personality differences, etc.), so without constant social pressure the extant phenotypic variation in behavior starts to show up again. Of course even in a modern economy where "rational actors" are individual agents who operate within a fluid market of goods and services these packs remain (social networks and connections), but the bureaucratic meritocracy breaks down their determinative power. The packs are a parameter in your success in life, but they are not the parameter. Man exists apart from the pack as a selfish consumer and personal producer, and to some extent these individual identities are given notional primacy. But it is not just a modern capitalist economy which allows this individualism to flourish. As documented in Benjamin Friedman's The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth the norms which we might define as broadly liberal individualism seem contingent upon a regime where one perceives that the future will be characterized by greater prosperity than the present. Which bring us back to Dubai; its prosperity is to a large extent built upon debt. I suspect that there's a good chance that when its economic growth is curtailed Dubai will become much less free-wheeling.

Addendum: Though in this post I allude to the constricting effect of the pack norms, obviously many people receive psychological utility from packishness. The cognitive "hooks" for pack behavior vs. individual consumer behavior are different, but they're both there in various proportions in all of us. Unfortunately I think that the modern liberal individualist society has inverted the totalism of the pre-modern traditionalist culture in terms of prioritizing only one aspect of our psychological predispositions. While in a traditional setting many who were by nature individualists chaffed at the social controls, today those who might benefit and find particular comfort in packs are marked off as somewhat deviant (e.g., women who are raised with liberal values but convert to a very traditionalist religion and immerse themselves in a subculture where their personal choices are constrained and channeled).

Note: The relationship between the main individual profiled in the piece and his girlfriend reminded me of the South Park episode Raisins. Ergo, the image.

Labels: culture

At least on the state level. A bold Swede who is not shy about plotting data took a stab at checking to see if the results in the personality variation paper could also show trends in GDP per capita:

Extroversion correlated weakly positive (0.16), agreeableness moderately (0.31), conscientiousness moderately (0.34), neuroticism weakly (0.13) and openness negatively (-0.26). That seems odd.

I have plotted the different factors vs GDP below (click for a larger version), with a bundle of regression lines added (each corresponds to the data minus one state, thus showing a bit how stable the estimates are).

Here's my explanation: the same state which has Silicon Valley also has Fresno (no offense to Fresno). The correlations I reported yesterday between Openness and something like patent production would only be generated by the tails of the social distribution. Silicon Valley, not Fresno. There's a reason that The Audacious Epigone looked at both high school graduation rates and college degree holding rates. The two don't always go in the same direction....

Update: From the comments::

He's interpreted the data wrong. Specifically, he plotted the state rank, not the z-value, and so the lowest valued states have the highest openness. The graph then does in fact show that higher openness produces higher per capita GDP. In fact all his correlations have the wrong sign because of this.

Still, he should plot the z-value instead.

If Anders doesn't do this, I might instead....

Labels: culture, Finn baiting

Steve points me to a John Tierney column, As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen:

"Humanity's jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the monopolization of power and resources by a few men was 'unnatural' in many ways," Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian. "In some ways modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots," he argues. "That means high sociopolitical gender equality over all, but with men and women expressing predisposed interests in different domains. Removing the stresses of traditional agricultural societies could allow men's, and to a lesser extent women's, more 'natural' personality traits to emerge."

I've made this precise argument on this weblog for several years now. The preoccupation with self-actualization and personal fulfillment which is the true religion of the mass consumer society is not something that I think is historically contingent or a random act of cultural evolution. It is an expression of a very deep rooted modal psychological predisposition that has echoed down from the Paleolithic and has simply been evoked by the modern context.

With all the talk about recent human evolution and the effect of agriculture obviously we've deemphasized the whole Pleistocene Mind model which was in the vogue with Evolutionary Psychologists. But these sorts of distinctions of emphasis highlight that variations of truth are often quantitative, not qualitative. Reality is a mix of various elements, not a set of stark alternatives. Agricultural peoples may carry more copies of AMY1, but they still enjoy the taste of meat. And it is illustrative that the elites of many agricultural societies allocated much of their marginal time to the sport of hunting.

After The Great Divergence and the transition to mass wealth societies we saw unleashed these ancient pent up preferences on a broader level. Today hunting is no longer the purview of rentier aristocracies who engage in their pleasures by capturing the surplus production of the peasantry. But we have not gone back to the past in some Eternal Recurrence. Rather, elements of pre-Neolithic psychology that have come to the fore and become explicit aspects of our cultural framework remain embedded in a matrix riddled with the great residual institutions of the traditional post-Neolithic world (e.g., religion, monarchies, formal law, etc.). And of course though we live in a culture where individuality is prized, we are not fragmented into small hunter-gatherer brands. Instead, the post-Industrial society dwarfs the post-Neolithic in the potential scope of social networks and scale of our tribes to such an extent that even the aforementioned institutions which arose to grapple with the complexities of the pan-tribal world have been stretched to their breaking points.

Labels: anthropology, culture

Many readers of this weblog are familiar with Robert Putnam's research showing that communitarianism may be inversely correlated with diversity. In the American context we're likely to view this through the prism of race and ethnicity. But Peter Turchin in his work tends to focus on religion and other ideologies as the group identities around which humans coalesce. Humans obviously have a need for conformity and solidarity; I recall as a child a Steelers fan getting into a fight with a Browns fan. So it should not be hard to observe the problems which ideological diversity produce even in an ethnically and racially homogeneous nation such as South Korea.

Last week there were mass demonstrations of Buddhists in South Korea against the religious parochialism of the current president, a Presbyterian elder. The president is already unpopular for other reasons, so I don't personally believe that this unrest is a necessary outcome of religious tension. Rather, as documented in books such as The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, a social context where individuals feel under stress and insecure will often produce intergroup conflict. In an age of plenty there is elbow room between factions because of the growing pie, but when we smell the Malthusian trap in the air group level affinities come to the fore as you don't want to become isolated as an individual without communal capital which you can leverage.

South Korea is I suspect a case where these dynamics might become more important in the coming years because of its religious diversity. Additionally, religious tension is not a new feature of the culture. It isn't too hard to find instances of fundamentalist Christians attacking Buddhism. This is similar to cases in Brazil where evangelicals have destroyed statues of the Virgin Mary. There several recent incidents associated with the current head of state which precipitated the present crisis, but note this:

But tension has been building up since December, when newly elected president Lee began filling his first cabinet with Christians. At least a half of his new ministers were people professing to be Christians, with the prime minister, Han Seung Soo, said to be a Roman Catholic. Not a single cabinet minister professed to be Buddhist.

or

Of the 15 members of Lee's Cabinet, 12 are Christian and one is Buddhist while the affiliation of two others was not immediately available.

So obviously there's some disagreement, but one can assume here that though Christians are 1/3 of the population they are the substantial majority of the cabinet. Is this prejudice? Discrimination? Do Buddhists have grounds to be angry? As I have noted before in South Korea Christianity has a strong correlation with higher socioeconomic status. If one assumes that cabinet level positions sample from the social and educational elites, then they will naturally tend to preponderantly be Christians! Of course since the president is a zealous Christian one can always be suspicious of his motive and method, so as a precautionary principle one could argue that there should have been an affirmative action to reach out to Buddhists so that the cabinet "looked like the nation."

In the United States we're so hung up on racial and ethnic factions that we often don't notice that the disparate representations of different religious groups in government. Check the religious affiliations of Congress and Governors. Thank God we live well below the Malthusian limit!

Labels: culture, History, Religion

As a special case of the downward trend in homicide and forcible rape beginning in the early 1990s, from 1990 to 2004, sexual abuse of minors steadily declined by 49%, reversing an upward trend from the 15 years before 1990; and from 1993 to 2004, sexual assaults against 12 to 17 year-olds steadily declined by 67%. See Finkelhor & Jones (2006) (free PDF here) for a review of the data, why they are real declines, and some proposed explanations. Also see Wolak et al. (2008) (free PDF here) for a review of the fact and fiction about internet sexual predators -- in particular, it appears that most sexual relationships involving teenage females that began with internet contact are voluntary (although still statutory rape if the female is under the age of consent), often repeated, and that the males rarely use deception. Unwholesome, but not what you see on To Catch a Predator.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the recent panic that the mass media have been fueling about "sexual predators" is horseshit. For the same methodological reasons as in this post on the rape hysterias, I look at data on the popularity of the "sexual predator" theme in the New York Times. It is the opposite of the prediction from a "following the beat" view of journalistic practice, instead fitting a "spreading an unfounded rumor" view. I propose a simple model and estimate the annual growth rate of the rumor. First, let's see how many articles were written in the NYT in a given year that contained "sexual predator," "sex predator," or the plural forms of these two terms.

Here is a graph:



Right away we observe that the coverage is completely outta whack with the crime statistics on the ground: the phrases first appear in 1966, but there is essentially no coverage up through 1980, a moderate increase until 1990, and an explosion of articles starting around 1990. Because the increase in coverage cannot be explained by a rational response to easily discovered crime statistics, we conclude that it is an irrational "moral panic" -- if the sexual predator did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Going further, let's look at the data from 1981 to 2007. I start with 1981 because that is the first year when at least 2 articles appear -- 1 article every 5 or 10 years you could write off as flukes -- and I drop 2008 since the year is not done yet:



Of the typical curves used to fit data, here the exponential does the best: r^2 = 0.8772, and there is a theoretical reason to expect exponential growth. Actually, a quadratic curve improves r^2 by 0.0037, but that's not very much, and it doesn't illuminate what's going on. By setting 1981 equal to t = 1, and calling the number of articles N, the curve above is:

N(t) = 0.8896*exp(0.1665*t) - 1

So, the estimated annual growth rate is 0.1665.

An exponential function solves a differential equation of the form:

dN/dt = r*N

In words, the rate of increase in the number of articles is directly proportional to the current number of articles, where r is the growth rate we just estimated above. This says that somehow each article begets more articles which beget more articles. This is how a rumor spreads, although "articles written" are technically not the same thing as "people who have heard the rumor." Perhaps in the future the number of articles will saturate at some level, and we will have to re-model it using logistic growth. Or the meme could become unfashionable and the number will plummet to 0, in which case we'd use a boom-and-bust model. These two more realistic models are variations on the S-I-R model of the spread of contagious diseases, the only difference being whether the "infected" people can lose their infectivity or stay infected forever.

Clearly the unlimited exponential growth model is inadequate because the total number of articles in all of the NYT is bounded, so the articles written on "sexual predators" cannot increase without bound. But since their number has not saturated yet (logistic model) or crashed downward (boom-and-bust model), we can't decide between the two more plausible models, let alone estimate the related parameters (like the steady-state number of articles in the logistic model). What is important here is that we have shown that the popularity of the "sexual predator" idea behaves like a rumor and takes on a life of its own or fuels its own growth.

To wrap up, the panic over "sexual predators" is a lot like the Early Modern witch-hunts, which could not have succeeded without mass communication to spread the rumors of well-to-do worry-warts. Because it's easier to swallow rumors than to investigate them, there's a clear incentive for most reporters to do just that. And most of the blogosphere too, for that matter. The desire to know is just not uniformly distributed among the population, even among the affluent sectors. That's something to consider any time you find yourself parroting the hype -- if it were based on good work, then it would pay to buy into it. But most journalists are too stupid, lazy, credulous, or moralistic to figure out what's going on. And most of the blogosphere too, for that matter.

Labels: crime, culture, mathematics

Aside from grunge music, what made the late '80s and early '90s culture so gay was a Third Wave of feminist panic, this time without a threat on the ground to respond to. A full employment plan for professional feminists thus required cooking up a boogeyman, and because they prey mostly on impressionable undergrad and grad students, they found it useful to invent the threat of "campus rape" and "date rape." There was a real rape problem in the general population leading up to 1992, though, so Third Wavers were simply parasitizing the popularity of a campaign aimed at helping real rape victims. Let's have a look at whether the various rape hysterias, measured by coverage in the NYT, responded to a real or manufactured threat.

To begin with the facts on the real threat, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the US Department of Justice, has data available on forcible rape from 1960 to 2006...

Here is a graph:



There is a fairly steady increase from 1964 to 1992, and a pretty steady decrease from then to 2006. To measure the national hysteria, we will count how many articles appeared in the opinion-leading NYT in a given year that contain some relevant phrase, which tells us how "in the air" the idea is. [1] Here is the graph for "rape crisis," almost always in the context of rape crisis centers, their organizers, and so on:



Overall it looks like it's tracking something real, namely the forcible rape rate: the phrase first appears soon after rape crisis centers were founded in the early '70s, and the graph steadily rises until 1993 and steadily falls afterward. A separate question is whether the level of panic in a given year is "appropriate" to the threat -- is there too much or too little coverage? That's a value judgment, or perhaps a tough empirical matter, so I won't explore that. What is clear is that the trend in coverage of rape crisis centers tracks the trend in forcible rape rate pretty well, so these articles are reporting on something real.

Rape crisis centers were not confined to colleges -- they were part of community outreach programs, so it makes sense that they would have been more in touch with reality. What happens if we look just at the hysteria about rape on college campuses? Heather Mac Donald wrote a good overview of the subject, called "The Campus Rape Myth". Here is the graph for "campus rape," "rape on campus," or the plural forms of these two phrases, which supports her use of the term "myth":



The graph is very different from before: there is almost no coverage until the late '80s, there is an abrupt spike lasting through the early '90s, and a sudden return to a lower level. The increase-then-decrease pattern is correct, and the peak is roughly where it should be, but the rest of the shape is all wrong. There should be a steady increase up to and away from the peak, not a sudden spike.

What the "campus rape" meme resembles is a bit of gossip that flares up and burns out quickly. The rise and fall of real rape happens on the time scale of decades, while the rise and fall of the "campus rape" myth unfolds on the scale of years. That's what we expect from a gossip model, since gossip spreads very quickly -- by word-of-mouth -- while the social forces that cause the rape rate to change cannot produce such fast changes, judging by how "slowly" social change in related areas proceeds (such as the rates for homicide, illegitimacy, divorce, etc., which also rise and fall on the order of decades). The fact that the two peaks are very close suggests that this myth "piggy-backed" on the popularity of a real threat; otherwise it wouldn't have been taken seriously. [2]

Lastly, let's look at the popularity of the more nebulous concept called "date rape." Here's a graph for articles containing "date rape," "date rapes," or "date raped":



As with "campus rape," the coverage is mostly divorced from reality: there is almost no coverage until the late '80s, an abrupt spike, a sudden downturn, and a steady but still high level afterward. So, unlike "campus rape," the "date rape" myth remains popular. Now, "date rape" is a great myth because it is too vague to easily measure, and therefore difficult to show it's not a grave threat. We know that this coverage cannot reflect forcible rape in general, since that has been declining since 1992, not stabilizing after 1995. One useful definition of "date rape" is rape by an acquaintance, as opposed to those dark-alley events. Here is a relevant fact from a journal article on the decline in many forms of abuse against minors since the early 1990s (another story you haven't heard anything about in the gossip-driven media):

Sexual assaults of teenagers have dropped, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). From 1993 through 2004, overall sexual assaults decreased 67% (Figure 2). The subgroup of sexual assaults by known persons was down even more.

Granted this is for victims aged 12 to 17, but the pattern among 18 to 24 year-olds must surely mirror this. Women far north of this are less likely to be raped at all, and in any event they are not the ones who the media portray as victims of date rape -- it's usually a naive college freshman, as in that dopey movie Higher Learning (a wonderful reflection of the zeitgeist). So, as with "campus rape," most of what you hear about "date rape" is folk mythology.

To close, how did the rape panics affect the average person? It likely gave well-to-do women an exaggerated view of the dangers of male sexuality, and likely left their male counterparts' heads spinning, with lasting effects. Let's take 1991 to be the peak year of these hysterias, and include the two years on either side, when the irrational ones were in their spike phase. Then let's consider people who were 15 to 24 years old -- those still forming their identities, growing into adulthood, figuring out how the social world works, who are open to new views, etc.

This creates a cohort born from roughly 1965 to 1978 that would most strongly bear the imprint of this hysteria, and especially those born around 1971 -- basically, Generation X, with Roissy's and Udolpho's cohorts being near ground zero, Half Sigma being one of the elder members, and Thursday being a younger member. Because the hysteria was so abrupt, there is a strong contrast right outside of this cohort -- for example, Steve Sailer and Alias Clio are not very far outside, but the tone of voice they use when talking about the battle of the sexes is very different, regardless of who turns out to be more accurate in a particular case. The same holds for most Baby Boomers.

The young people I'm friends with or have tutored, who were still in diapers in 1991, don't seem to bear the imprint of the hysteria -- you had to be a struggling adolescent or young adult at the time for it to really fuck with your mind. Children were too blissfully ignorant, while full adults' outlook on the world had already comfortably congealed, more or less. It is no accident that this cohort produced the pickup artists like Mystery -- the women in this group are more psycho than in other cohorts, and the men still have a bad taste in their mouths from being on the receiving end of a national witch hunt. (Full disclosure: I was born in 1980.)

Why didn't the nutty Second Wave of feminism leave a similar imprint on those born before 1965? All of that Andrea Dworkin stuff couldn't have been easy to stomach. I think because, as exaggerated as the Second Wave ideology was, there was a real and steady increase in violence against women at the time, not to mention the parallel increase in homicide, drug use, race riots, and all other kinds of sick shit. You may not have agreed with their assessment of how bad things were, or what caused them, but you could still tell that things seemed to be getting worse -- at least they weren't making everything up.

However, the '90s reversed just about every awful social trend of the previous 30-odd years. Surrounded by evidence of things not being so bad, you could only react with total bewilderment when a group of average women -- not just the bulldog lesbians -- got in your face about how awful men are for date raping their friends and turning college campuses into rape zones, so that women needed to Take Back the Night. The appropriate response to this is, of course, "Are you all fucking crazy?" But that would have only strengthened the witch-hunters' suspicion that you were a closet-rapist. It's a hardening experience to be told that you and the other guys in the room are potential rapists of the girl sitting the next row over.

Tomorrow I'll look at a closely related myth, though this time one that is still increasing in popularity, and I'll propose a model for it and estimate parameters.

[1] I eliminated any "duplicate" results, such as a "summary of the Metro section" that only mentions that there's an article on rape inside (I only counted the real article), or in some cases if what should have been a single long article was salami sliced into 6 or so short pieces -- for example, if a single day's feature on "campus rape" had 6 vignettes focusing on 6 campuses, I counted only one of them. Overall these were rare, though. The 2008 data-points are up through September 1, but I included them just to get a hint of where things are now.

[2] In terms of differential equation modeling, the growth rate of the parasitic response would be an increasing function of the current level of the real threat, and perhaps of the rational response too.

Labels: crime, culture, feminism, the early 90s were gay

A rumor I've been hearing a lot lately, although I recall hearing it as early as 2003, is that "porn is becoming / has become mainstream" -- or that it's ubiquitous, unavoidable, the wallpaper of our culture. Like most alarmist ideas spread by the innumerate -- failing schools, oral sex rampant among teenagers, the coming Islamic Caliphate -- I assume it is a gross exaggeration or false. And as always, I'm right. It doesn't take a genius: simply judge based on the track record of similar panics made possible by mass media, going back to the witch hysterias of Early Modern Europe.

I collected a bunch of data about a month ago and planned on doing some time series analysis, maybe showing how certain models (like epidemics or logistic growth) would fit the data, but the fall semester begins soon, and I'm preparing enough as it is. So nuts to the analysis; I'll just present the data, since the picture is very clear. In brief, the popularity of pornographic movies has remained steady for over 20 years, and in a sense for the last 35 years -- when the data begin. The popularity of print pornography fell sharply after its peak in the early/mid 1970s and has more slowly declined for about the past 20 years. Even non-pornographic but racy "lad mags" have seen their popularity tank, with only Maxim US holding steady.

Before getting to the data, though, how far back does the "porn has become mainstream" meme go? I didn't conduct an exhaustive search, but I found a 1990 letter-to-the-editor in the NYT, as well as a 1998 news story in Time, so it's hardly new. It's interesting to note that most such articles feature a quote like this one from New York Magazine in 2003:

Over beers recently, a 26-year-old businessman friend shocked me by casually remarking, "Dude, all of my friends are so obsessed with Internet porn that they can't sleep with their girlfriends unless they act like porn stars."

The grave implication is: "Just think of what young people who grow up with this will expect!" But a moment's reflection tells us that the same is true of men who visit prostitutes, who've been around forever. And yet men haven't come to expect their wives to behave like wild whores inside or outside the bedroom -- again, except for the handful of 20-something losers who New York Magazine manages to mine such embarrassing quotes from. Indeed, the universal Madonna / Whore dichotomy tells us that most men will continue to prefer their flings to act like call girls, pornstars, strippers, etc., while preferring their gfs and wives to act not whorish.

Enough gasbaggery; onto the data (and then more hot air). The "porn is everywhere" meme claims that a high percentage of people are infected by porn, whether through video or print. Obviously the claim is not that there's a lot of porn out there, but which no one ever consumes -- so we just look at the prevalence of porn-watchers over time. Fortunately, the General Social Survey, a large and representative national survey, asks Americans if they've watched an X-rated movie in the past year. To see for yourself, go here and type in, without quotes, "xmovie" in the row box and "year" in the column box. If you want to see male vs. female, type "sex(1)" for male or "sex(2)" for female into the selection filter box. Across the years, the response rate is 58%, from about 51,000 people -- damn good for surveys. Here are the results for men and women (click on the image to see it full-size):



For men, porn-watching declined at least from 1973 until 1980, and increased until 1987. After that, you may be able to see fluctuations up and down but they're around a pretty steady value of about 35%. The pattern for women is much clearer to see: essentially no trend, but cycles of varying period and amplitude. I interpret these patterns as a decline during the 1970s when porn theaters became unfashionable, an increase during the 1980s as porn became available on VHS, and no change afterward -- in particular, no skyrocket due to the availability of internet porn, something I would not have predicted by intuition.

Also bear in mind that if porn were indeed "becoming more mainstream," we should see a strong upward trend just because people are less embarrassed to admit they watch it. Only if people in the 1970s were hooked up to porn 24 hours a day but denying it, while people today admit to it at the same rate but are watching less, would we observe a lack of a strong upward trend. Even in that case, that means porn-watching was more prevalent in the past. I favor a simpler interpretation: that because porn has not become mainstream, nor more taboo, people tell the truth at the same rates from the sexually liberated 1970s up to today.

There are of course liars, but they don't seem concentrated in one period or another. How bad is the lying in any period, though? -- maybe all men are watching porn now but only 35% admit it. In 2003, the Nielsen Ratings people tracked the traffic of internet porn sites, and they found that 1 in 4 internet users visits porn sites (see here). That's just what we'd expect from the GSS results, which show that of men and women combined, 24% in 2002 and 26% in 2004 watched porn. Traffic doesn't lie, and because the numbers are virtually identical to what people say, we conclude that almost nobody lies about watching porn (at least in anonymous surveys). So not only have their proportions not increased relative to before, but porn-watchers are not even a majority of men -- a bit more than one-third. For women, even less so -- about one-sixth. Porn is not now, and never was, mainstream.

Turning to porn in print, I collected circulation data for Playboy for any year I could find. The data are from many sources -- business sections of newspapers, histories of the magazine, etc. -- and for some years I couldn't find estimates. Still, there are plenty to see a clear pattern. I did the same for Maxim's US edition, both shown here:



Playboy accelerated in popularity from its beginning in 1953 to 1973, after which it plummets until 1987, and then it slowly but steadily declines to today. I don't have rich data to show it, but from what I read in my research, the same rough pattern holds for other porn magazines like Penthouse and Hustler. Maxim looks like it's grown logistically, on analogy with a fad growing by word-of-mouth contagion. Maxim of course is not porn; the nearest thing might be 1940s pin-ups. I speculate that Playboy's exponential growth was due to featuring young brunette girl-next-door types, and its crash due to using blonder and older "power bitch" types. Maxim has done well, in this view, for relying so heavily on dark-haired women. In any event, we see that porn has not become mainstream in print either -- just the opposite.

One last batch of data mostly from the UK, home of the "lad mag." Almost as soon as the fad had begun, it peaked and began plummeting, which has been well covered in the British press. I've shown it here for three of the most popular UK lad mags (I culled the data from various newspaper or other reports):



The US edition of FHM appeared to be doing well, even if it had begun to saturate. The drop-off I drew to show that it was abruptly canceled and only exists as a website now. Stuff Magazine, also once popular in the US, was cancelled in 2007. So even the non-porn but racy lad mags are dying off, save Maxim US.

Because the "porn has become mainstream" meme is part of a panic -- either about eroding cultural standards, eroding barriers between public and private vis-a-vis sex, eroding relations between men and women due to unrealistic expectations, or the erosion of something else -- most of those who already believe it will not be persuaded by the stark clarity of the data here. (Hopefully the open-minded ones will end up reading this.) Like witch-hunters, they will shift the goalposts perhaps by saying, "Well yeah, but that just means that porn's influence is more subtle and covert, but no less pervasive and corrupting because of that."

The first target will be female appearance, of course: as porn becomes more ubiquitous, they start dressing like sluts! Except that porn-watching increased most dramatically and reached a peak during the '80s -- the decade of high-waisted pants, granny-panties, and bulky manlike tops (baggy sweaters, shoulder-pads, etc.). I've written elsewhere about how girls don't even dress like sluts anymore, a 5-year fad in thongs notwithstanding.

The second target will be sexual behavior: as porn becomes more ubiquitous, people will begin acting more promiscuously. But I've already shown that there was probably a single increase and single decrease in promiscuity, with the turning point around 1991. The popularity of porn either waxes and wanes for women or dips, increases and stays for men -- it has nothing to do with how promiscuous people are.

Anyway, I could go on, but you get the idea. Let's all be done with this "porn has become mainstream" nonsense.

Labels: babes and hunks, culture

Tyler points to a new story in The New York Times highlighting discoveries about the Antikythera mechanism:

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism's concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with the great Archimedes.

...

"We believe that this mechanism cannot have been the first such device since it is so sophisticated and complex," Dr. Freeth said. "And we don't understand why this extraordinary technology apparently disappeared for several hundred years, later to emerge in the great astronomical clocks of the 14th century onwards."

My explanation: the ancients had scientists and technologists, but they did not have Science and Technology. In other words, science and technology as we understand it today in the age of scientific industry is a cultural complex which has attained critical mass and is self-perpetuating. One does not need to manifest the brilliance of Isaac Newton to stand upon his shoulders, the sociocultural framework takes Newtonianism as a given. There were scientists in ancient Greece, in the Islamic world, China, India, etc., of various sorts. But these people lacked a cultural framework in terms of a critical mass of numbers which arose in the West sometime between 1600 and 1900 as a cumulative process.*

This is not to say that the "knowledge based" economy is a function of the modern West, it is not. The ancient Greeks had lawyers, doctors and philosophers. So did many other civilizations at various points in history. Legal frameworks, as an example, are essential for complex society, but it also seems to be that they arise necessarily from mass societies of a particular threshold of complexity. The mass societies of the post-Neolithic world straining against the bounds of the Malthusian trap were not barbaric; but they were not mass consumer societies. While I do not believe that science & technology as I am conceiving of them in this post were necessary or sufficient to drive the productivity gains which are required for existence outside of the Malthusian trap,** I suspect that they will be necessary to perpetuate said society into the indefinite future. Science & technology are not hallmarks of civilization, but they necessities of continued affluence.

* That cultural complex's emergence might be contingent upon a host of parameters. For example, the printing press, the unity imposed by Latin as a common language for western European intellectuals, the lack of a unified ideology to suppress diversity of thought (remember that the Reformation broke the Church's power to stifle new currents in Protestant Europe, while Protestant high priests likewise had no power in Catholic Europe), etc.

** This is not to say that I don't think technology was not necessary or essential for the massive productivity gains, but the scientific-industrial-complex which we know and love (I hope!) today didn't coalesce into its full form until the past century or so, though I do believe its origins can be traced back to the 17th century.

Labels: culture