Brojectives

(It’s Objectives time at work. Thousands of people are filling in online forms with no more than five objectives and two measures each, to be spread across five areas of the business. It takes a least two iterations to get used to it. I take a day to work at home to do the darn thing as it takes that long to get into the right mind-set and jargon. This was me blowing off steam.)

Every year a Bro must set out his Brojectives. To help you do this, we’ve developed a structured framework around the Six Key Values of a Bro. These are:

1. Bench Press
2. Deadlifts
3. Squats
4. Diet
5. Work
6. Social Life

Your objective for the first three should be to do more than you did last year. More weight and more reps. Unless you have grey hair, when simply doing as much as you did last year will be enough. But then, no Bro has grey hair.

The goal for your Diet should be: eat more chicken, and cut down on the salad. One lettuce leaf is enough for a salad. Eating too much salad takes away valuable space from chicken. If you’re a vegetarian, remember that chicken is a vegetable.

Work. You need a goal for work. Get a job, for instance. Or one that pays enough for your gym fees, chicken, protein shakes, and somewhere to sleep when you’re not in the gym or at work.

Social Life. Hanging with your Bros doesn’t count, since you will be training when you do that. Social life is when your girlfriend insists you go with her to a movie about vampires, or take her out for a meal where you have to watch her eat unnatural food groups like cheesecake. Since you could be training or making overtime during this social life, your objective should be to reduce it. By at least twenty per cent. Try to convince her that eating Dominos while watching you do pull-ups is a dinner-date. Let me know how that works out.

So there you are. Brojectives made easy. Please submit your Brojectives for sign-off by the end of the month.

(With props to Dom Mazetti)

January 2018 Diary

As if 2018 is a real year, and not something that was in a Dan Dare comic.

Somewhere towards the end of 2017 I started to slow down and started to rush home. I cut short my gym routine to make sure I caught a certain train from Waterloo. But once I got home, I had no energy to focus on doing anything useful.

So I started 2018 with the intention of hitting the gym Tuesdays and Thursdays, going to a Meeting Wednesdays, and working five days except when I need to be home for workmen, or perhaps just need a break from commuting. To make myself do that, I decided I’d have something to eat after the gym as a reward and an incentive, to help build the habit. Also to dodge the 18:00 - 19:00 trains and to lose that hour at home when I’d just mooch around. So when I get home, it’s around 20:00, and I set up for the next morning and climb into bed by about 20:45. All those meals may sound expensive, but, I’m not going to the movies at £16 a shot, nor do I drink, smoke or go out. And I’m just having a main and coffee. Okay. A dessert when I try somewhere new. So frankly I’m not going to beat myself up about it.

I’ve been busy on a project, and the long think-piece posts I’ve done recently. Those take way more time to write than it takes to read. What takes the time is setting down all the junk thoughts, the easy thoughts and the confused thoughts, and then getting rid of them.

I’m almost at the end of S2 of House, which I’m enjoying. Movies - phut! Haven’t been in the mood for novels, but I have been scanning through a book on p-adic numbers now and again. And reading three or four pages of Hegel’s Aesthetics at bedtime. I’ll be done by the end of February.

It’s too damn cold or wet at the weekends, so I’m doing very little. The advantage of going to the gym on Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon is that it gives me the sense that I’ve done something active both days. Which of course I have.

Bad Behaviour is Morally Bad Behaviour, Not Evolved Bad Behaviour

My disagreement with the Red Pill is not over the facts of women’s behaviour. Lord knows it was a relief all those years ago to find out I Wasn't The Only One who saw what I saw.

The Red Pill view is that solipsism, selective hypo-agency and hypergamy are evolutionary hard-wired behaviours and that women are no more responsible for acting that way than beavers are for building dams. What I see as reprehensible opportunism, it sees as, well, sneezing. The problem with this is that evolution, which is concerned with DNA modifications, does not affect cultural behaviours, which are not only not determined by DNA but are almost completely independent of it. I’ve discussed this in a previous post, and to summarise the conclusion

Because sexual selection has no correlation with evolutionary advantage, contemporary human behaviour is not the result of thousands of years of evolutionary fine-tuning. There is no evolutionary rationale for your neighbour’s cockolding wife: she has no idea whether the Bad Boy impregnating her has more dominant genes than her faithful provider Beta husband. That’s just evo-porn for the masses. Hypergamy, cuckolding, testing for social dominance and all the rest may help determine present advantage, but have no evolutionary efficacy beyond chance. DNA doesn’t work like that.

So let’s de-theorise some of this. ‘Solipsism’ in this context means two things: first, that seeing other people’s actions as if they acted for the same reasons one would if one were in that situation; second, only giving weight to one's own reasons and purposes, while the needs and purposes of other people are irrelevant. The solipsist is the only person who matters in their world. In plain English, this is a mixture of selfishness, projection and lack of experience and understanding.

‘Selective hypo-agency’ is simply a rationalisation tactic. They did something bad or ill-judged? They ‘made a mistake’, someone else was to blame, they were distracted, they didn’t have all the information they needed, sometimes good people do bad things, and so on. But only when it’s to their advantage.

‘Hypergamy’ is the chronic feeling that one could have done better and still could. In marketing-speak, it’s buyer’s regret. If only they had waited, they might have had a chance at someone better. Buyer’s regret is caused by a continuing review of what’s on the market. The only way to avoid it is to stop looking once one has made one's choice. But the hypergamist can’t. Because they doesn’t trust their decision, and that’s because they doesn’t trust themsleves to make a good judgement about partners, or probably anything else. Hypergamy comes from a chronic insecurity.

Selfishness, rationalisation, chronic insecurity: these sound like personality flaws and moral failings, and are especially linked to Cluster B’s. It’s a mistake is to look for an explanation for these flaws and failings. That would play right into the hypoagency trap. They can’t help it because reasons and you should accept the results. Whether Cluster B traits have a basis in genetics is morally irrelevant: the actor has legal agency, and gets moral agency as a consequence.

My view that these are moral failings rather than evolved universal behaviours leads me to commend men to step away from the crazy, and also to the view that a majority of women will not consistently show these behaviours. That would seem to contradict the Red Pill position, which holds that All Women Are Like That, but it doesn’t quite.

It’s one thing to say that Not All Women Have Personality Disorders, and another to say that a lot of women will start acting out if their partner fails to meet some basic standards of attention-provision, security-provision, and immediate, direct feedback.

That acting out is not evolved behaviour, it’s immaturity. An adult has the self-awareness and honesty to explain what is wrong, and the tact to do so in a manner that avoids shaming and blaming. At least that's what the relationship counsellors hold up as the ideal.

Adult behaviour is a lot easier when there’s little or no neurotic emotional investment in the relationship. If you don’t have any, or only very low-level, neuroses, all your relationships will be adult, transactional, and risk-managed, and you won’t be married, as marriage fails the risk-management test. To be married at all means there’s a neurosis there somewhere just waiting to turn her into a facsimile of a Cluster B in full effect, and him into a passable imitation of a sulking kid.

In practical terms, there’s no difference between how I and the Red Pill see life for a married man. He needs to keep up the attention-provision, teasing, dread, security-provision and feedback, informed by telepathy as to what is needed at what time.

Sounds like a ton of work for very little reward to me. That has to do with my history as an ACoA / Alcoholic / Addict and what it means for my hormone soup. I don’t get the good hormones, and I get way more of the bad hormones, than other people get from those complicated interactions. It’s all push away and no pull towards. I’m guessing at what other men feel and how it works for them, but whatever it is, from my point of view, it must be one hell of a powerful drug.

That's why I feel the way I do about it all. Doesn't affect the fact that Bad Behaviour isn't explained by evolution. It's explained by present, imminent, neuroses, and a decision to behave badly.

Why Sexual Selection Doesn't Select and That's Bad News for the Evo-Psychos

‘Evolution’ is not the name of a specific process, as for example ‘fermentation’ is, nor is it an abstract process that has realisations in a number of different contexts, as for example ‘compilation’ (of machine code) is. It’s a place-holder for a process or event: when the DNA of a species changes - without at the same time changing it into a different species - ‘evolution’ tell us to look for a change in the circumstances of that species that caused or facilitated that change. It tells us to look for a natural cause rather than magic. It does allow limited magic, in the form of DNA damage, combination or random mutation.

‘Evolution’ does not ‘cause’ anything to happen. Rather, ‘something’ causes a species’ DNA to change and that ‘something’ is gathered with all the other ‘somethings’ under the heading of ‘evolution’. This is why the only people who argue with ‘evolution’ have world-views that depend on creationism. They want us to look for God(s) as an explanation of the natural world, and Darwin wanted us to look for the natural world to explain the natural world.

When Darwin proposed looking for natural rather than magical explanations, he had no idea about DNA and its attendant chemistry and engineering. Mendel suggested genes about forty years later, and Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA almost a hundred years later, and it would take them a further decade to work out the roles of RNA, mRNA and how the gene makes chemicals in the cell. It was about forty years later, that a number of people suggested that genes could undergo short-term localised changes that do not affect the DNA sequence, in response to the environment of their carrier phenotype, which we now know as epigentics.

We can’t blame Darwin and his successors for putting forward some fairly ropey suggestions about how species change. We can blame their pop-culture successors for continuing to promote those ropey ideas. Anyone in academe still talking about sexual selection as an evolutionary mechanism is looking for book sales, not answers. Why?

Evolutionary ‘fitness’ is measured by the proportion of future generations that carry the animal’s genes. It follows from this that the evolutionary fitness of an individual cannot be known at the time of mating, but only by some future biologist. This is as it should be: nobody knows if the environment might change sometime in the future to favour traits currently hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Predicting evolutionary fitness means predicting the future. However, we can make some limit-case observations. Individuals who die without offspring have an evolutionary fitness of zero. In a settlement of N people, an individual’s evolutionary fitness is approximately n/N where n is the number of children they have. It’s fairly easy to see where that goes: if the settlement is the planet, the evolutionary fitness of an individual is vanishingly small. We can measure the fitness of a trait or gene in the same way, and that will achieve higher measures.

Because evolutionary fitness cannot be known at the time of reproduction, and is anyway vanishingly small for individuals, means that the pop-culture idea of the female somehow choosing a ‘fit’ mate is more or less nonsense. There are no ‘fit mates’. There are ‘fit traits’, but for reasons that defy understanding, looking like Ryan Gosling or Eva Mendes don’t seem to be amongst them. Culture and evolution are orthogonal (sigh).

I’m going to need to spend more time on sexual selection than it really deserves, because it’s one of those ideas that really appeals to people, and it sticks in the mind like a burr.

Sexual selection is not females somehow divining the quality of their mate’s genes and his willingness to hang around post-coitus to provide for the offspring. She can’t do that because she can’t predict the future. At the very most she can choose by analogy with other couples who seem to be successful at the moment, but the she doesn’t know if they are going to continue to be successful. Partnerships are like any other investment: past performance is no guarantee of future results. Sexual selection is the selection of any other trait that hitch-hikes with traits that make the male attractive to the female. She chooses on the basis of the man’s attractiveness, and takes her chances about what else follows. The idea that attractiveness is itself a fitness trait, because attractive people have more surviving children, has only gained popularity since the mid 1960’s, which by no coincidence, is when the so-called Sexual Revolution started. It’s retro-fitting the ideas to women’s contemporary sexual behaviour. Previous descriptions were there to valorise the social role women were supposed to be playing.

First, smart, pretty people tend to have fewer or no children or to stay single: they have the options, and they have the intellectual resources to enjoy the culture of their time. Second, most women think, according to the surveys, that only twenty per cent of men are ‘above average’ in looks. So how is it that far more than twenty per cent of men have children? Clearly there’s a disconnect between inter-subjectively-agreed attractiveness and who a woman is prepared to get pregnant by. Third, the only way to save the hypothesis is to make the idea of ‘attractive’ hopelessly subjective, contextual and contingent, and therefore so obviously un-linked with actual evolutionary fitness, that the whole thing falls apart.

If ‘spreading success by selection’ does not work, what does? ‘Restricting failure’. As an example, by now the syphilis bacteria should by now have evolved to deal with penicillin, since many other bacteria have turned into ‘superbugs’ in a much shorter time, but it hasn’t. Superbugs arise because some had anti-biotic resistance and some did not. The ones that didn’t were wiped out, leaving the ones with the resistance to breed. Syphilis bacteria seem not to have any variants in its population which are resistant to penicillin.

Eagles who didn’t build their nests in inaccessible places and spent most of the day soaring would have lost their young more or less immediately. The only eagles left after a few years of that would be the ones whose genetics disposed them to build their nests half-way up a cliff. In another example, the birds of a given species don’t develop harder beaks when the supply of softer seeds runs out: instead, there was intra-species variation for beak shape and hardness. The birds with soft beaks starved, as did their offspring, and the birds with harder beaks don’t starve, and their offspring live. The birds don’t need to kill anybody, or deny them access to resources. Nature did that all by itself.

In people, a characteristic lasts because someone is willing to breed with a carrier. Socially dysfunctional behaviour can survive, passed down the generations by example, genes, and culture, as long as someone can be found to breed with the person behaving like that. Otherwise the human race would have bred out drunks, shrews, addicts, borderlines, anti-socials, and all sorts of other problem-people, well before the Greeks developed psychology to name the problems. But no. All those dodgy traits were kept going by men who just couldn’t keep their dicks out of crazy, and by women who just couldn’t say no to Bad Boys. The human race has not wiped out one dysfunctional psychological trait, or one physical malformation or dysmorphism, by breeding it out. What it did do was develop an understanding of diet and medicine. That’s why the WHO eliminated smallpox in a generation. Cluster B disorders, which are defined by specific behaviours and show a high heritability could be bred out in a couple of generations, if men knew how to identify the behaviours and refused to mate with anyone who showed the behaviour. Hasn’t happened yet.

Cultural skills are mostly learned, and at a high cost of time and effort, and there is very little correlation between genetics and, say, virtuoso tenor saxophone playing, the thousands of hours of playing needed to achieve those levels of virtuosity, and the personal characteristics needed to put in that effort. There is of course a genetic influence on being a virtuoso tenor sax player. Playing a musical instrument often is a mood-altering activity and the ability of the player’s body (the brain is part of the body) to enter one of the moods needed to play for extended periods of time will be dependent on the release and re-uptake of one or more hormones: that is genetic in the first instance and then a result of use. Not being tone-deaf, and to be able to sense rhythm, these are to some extent genetic, though given the basics, a lot can be learned.

Because cultural features are not linked to DNA, evolutionary processes cannot remove tenor saxophonists from the world. Violence could remove the saxophonists, and legislation could prohibit the manufacture, ownership or playing of a tenor sax, but that’s not evolution because there’s no gene being changed or eliminated. Oddly, if there was a tenor-sax-playing gene, and the human race decided to kill its present carriers, that would be evolution. It would be genocide and a crime as well, and it would count as a sorry moment in human evolution. Evolution is not progress, it’s simply change.

There was a brief period when people thought there would a gene for everything, but that search has been fruitless, except for a handful of rare diseases. It seems that many features of the phenotype can be produced by a number of different combinations of genes, or that external stimulus is needed as well as the presence of genes. Making a male, after all, requires X and Y chromosomes, an SRY gene to trigger the production of testes, the testes to produce testosterone and other androgens, and an androgen receptor. Any of that goes wrong, you don’t get a boy, you get a girl with maybe some bits missing. Genes are not one-one mapped to human behaviours. Mostly there’s no mapping at all.

All this is bad news for the evo-psycho crowd. Because genes don’t produce the details of a given culture, it turns out that almost nothing about human culture has anything to do with evolution. Because sexual selection has no correlation with evolutionary advantage, contemporary human behaviour is not the result of thousands of years of evolutionary fine-tuning. There is no evolutionary rationale for your neighbour’s cockolding wife: she has no idea whether the Bad Boy impregnating her has more dominant genes than her faithful provider Beta husband. That’s just evo-porn for the masses. ‘Strategies’ such as hypergamy, cuckolding, testing for social dominance and all the rest may be good strategies for determining present advantage, but have no evolutionary efficacy beyond chance. DNA doesn’t work like that.

On Probability Theory and Theories of Probability

(This expands on some ideas I touched on in the post about the single-event probability fallacy. If you have a sense of deja vu, that’s why. It’s a different angle in the same ideas.) 

Probability theory is abstract mathematics. It has the same axioms as measure theory (plus one that says the measure of the whole space is 1, but that’s really just a convention), and it focuses on different things. As a theory, it has applications.

One is to the frequencies of outcomes of repeated events, such as rolling a dice, making a component by machine tool, or the path of a small particle surrounded by fast-moving smaller particles. With a suitably set-theoretic understanding of what ‘events’ and ‘outcomes’ are, probability theory can be shown to apply to such frequencies.

Another application is to betting odds, though here probability theory does not apply as a description but rather as a prescription. If the betting odds are to be ‘fair’, that is, if the odds don’t favour the bookmaker or the customer, those odds must follow the laws of probability.

The same applies to the idea of ‘degree of belief’, whatever that means and however we measure it. If those degrees of belief are to be consistent, they must follow the laws of probability. Betting-odds and degrees of belief are sometimes called subjectivist probability.

In earlier and less enlightened times, there were heated arguments over which was the ‘real theory of probability’, and both sides missed the point that they were discussing different applications of the same abstract theory, and as a result were having an argument about whether over-easy or well-done was the correct way of cooking eggs.

In addition, there was something called ‘The Principal Principle’ stating that the rational degree of belief in the outcome of a repeated event is its frequency. The result is that, if we are talking about repeated outcomes, probability means frequencies.

This leaves the question about what we might mean by the probability of single events and how it might be measured. The ingenuity of some answers rival the madder interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. Some of them turn out to be frequencies in disguise, as is the Possible Worlds interpretation. (I’m not going to describe that: it’s like the Multiverse and just as non-empirical.) It’s not that those interpretations don’t work: it’s that only about forty people at any given time can understand them, and none of them work as statisticians. So whatever the working statisticians might mean, it’s not what the ingenious people suggest.

Personally, I think that phrases like ‘I don’t think that’s very likely’ or ‘I wouldn’t be surprised’ or ‘That’s probably what happened’ are figures of speech, referring, if to anything, to something that does not have to obey the probability calculus. There is no obligation on the figurative speech of ordinary people to obey rules made up by mathematicians. People do believe things, and that belief may be a bodily sensation, as the disappointment of a belief often is. Maybe those figures of speech are about the strength of those belief-sensations. We can, of course, say that if those belief-sensations are to be rational, they need to obey the probability calculus, but what we can’t say is that if they don’t, then ordinary people should not use probability-words to express their beliefs. Ordinary language got there first.

Similar issues affect the idea of the expected value. The expected value, or expectation, or prevision in French, or average in GCSE arithmetic, is a mathematical construction. It’s the sum of the probability-weighted outcome values. The formal expected value of a single roll of a fair dice is 1/6+2/6+3/6+4/6+5/6+6/6, which is 3.5 and that’s never going to appear on any roll of a six-sided dice. (A fair dice has no modal value - or perhaps it has six - and its median is any value between 3.00000000...1 and 3.999999999999... ) as well: half the throws will be below a number between 3 and 4 and the other half will be above it.

In a game with payoffs of £0 and £100, with equal odds, the expected value is £50, but that will never be the result of an individual trial: the payoffs are £0 or £100. It is what we would expect to be the long run average value of the payoff per trial. However, an actual sequence of trials that ever reached and stabilised at £50 after a ‘reasonable number’ of trials would be quite rare: what we should really expect is that the actual average payoff per trial should appear to converge to £50 as the number of trials increased. Measuring an expected value in practice is much more complicated than calculating it.

We can always make a formal calculation and, rightly, call that the expected value. But we must ask how that value is to be measured, and if it can’t be, or only has a meaning in some series of counter-factual logical universes, then it remains a formal calculation with no practical application. We can calculate the expected value of a one-off event, but we can’t measure it. Measuring expected values is a process that refers implicitly to a run of outcomes. The formal calculation for a single event is correct, but formal correctness is no guarantee of empirical application.

Since the formal expected value of our game has no empirical meaning for one event, it can’t be a guide to any decision we make. This has, as I’ve discussed before, some consequences for so-called rational economics.

The Tit-For-Tat Conjecture

Suppose you and I are going to play a co-operation game. There are many strategies for these, but the most beneficial is tit-for-tat: start by co-operating, then repeat the previous move of the other player. It’s simple, but it doesn’t dominate all the others. But it does give the maximum reward. If I know you’re going to use it, I may as well climb on board for those maximum rewards as well. Tit-For-Tat is a fairly rare strategy: it works even when the other person knows you’re using it. In fact, it works especially when the other person knows you’re using it.

One that fails if it’s public knowledge is the Secretary Strategy. In this, an employer is hiring, and has a limited time to pick a new person. It turns out that the most effective strategy is for them to look at the first third of the candidates, and then hire the first candidate better than all the ones they have already seen. This will get them the best candidate in 37% of hires. Some, of course, will never hire anyone, because the best was in the first third. It’s not a reliable strategy.

In this economy, recruitment is done through agencies, and they get to know the habits of the recruiter. If the agency know the employer uses the Secretary Strategy, they will arrange for the employer to see lesser-quality applicants at first, so they can place a reasonable one rapidly. The Secretary Strategy fails because the employment agent invalidates one of the assumptions, which is that candidates arrive at random. But then that’s the point of strategies and gaming. The only way out for an employer is to recruit directly, like they used to. Even then, in a small world, which some industries are, an interviewee finding she is the first might politely decline, on the grounds that ‘everyone knows you never hire the first person you see’. This denies the employer the opportunity to calibrate that the Strategy provides. The only way out of that is to lie to the candidates about their place in the queue: that’s not such a smart idea.

Most strategies are like this: they work as long as the other side don’t know. What makes Tit-For-Tat different? The Secretary Strategy predicts the future behaviour of its user, which allows others to game it. Tit-For-Tat can also be predicted, but the prediction is based on the other person’s behaviour, not its user’s intentions.

Strategies are, amongst other things, formalised intentions. If we know the strategy, we have a good idea about the objectives it is intended to achieve, and if we know that, we can make more informed guesses about the other ploys the other side might use.

Here’s a Conjecture: any strategy that works even when the other side knows you’re using it is equivalent to Tit-for-Tat.

If this is true, the immediate consequence is: unless you’re using Tit-for-Tat, your strategy can be gamed to your disadvantage.

Best Drop Ever!

I came across a video of what was supposed to be the "Best Drop Ever" from Carl Cox, and then Skrillex. Horrible stuff with all the subtlety of a slap on the back. "Oi mate, here's the beat."

The 'Drop' in case you don't go near certain types of dance music, is the moment the beat kicks back in after a floaty, beatless period of chords or other music designed a) to give the dancers a rest, and b) to make them wait for the beat so they appreciate it more. 'Bangers' hardly ever have drops, or if they do, the floaty bit is very short.

The longest build-up and deepest drop I know is not by a DJ at all. Not even The Great Digweed has matched the drop on this track. I play this over headphones at work, and it's just plain awesome.