tbentley.com

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/5/10918164/donald-trump-morality

Well, we can use the Bayes Probability Theorem to figure out how likely is is that fracking will pollute our water supply.

Suppose the probability of fracking polluting the water supply in any one spot–say, within 500 yards of the fracking site–is originally estimated, before any evidence of pollution has been found, to be only 0.5%.

Now an event happens, such as the real event: water coming from a tap in a house, which draws its water from a well, starts to ignite when an open flame is brought near it.

What are the chances that the fracking caused the pollution?  We can estimate that there is about a 40% chance that fracking is the cause.  We can also posit that, without the fracking, natural causes might cause the water to become polluted; but it’s very rarely that a water supply spontaneously becomes flammable, so let’s put that possibility at 0.05%.

Plugging these values in to the Bayesean Theorem; x=.5, y=50%, z=0.05%

Bayesean Theorem:  P = xy / xy + z(1-x)

Solving for P :  There is a 83% chance that fracking will pollute the water supply.

That is not a trivial possibility.

You can play with these figures, using my Bayesean Calculator.  In any case, you will not find the possibility of pollution from fracking to be anything but frightening.

Hey, nothing wrong with that, right?

Remember the VW Bus?  Sometimes it was a camper; mostly it was just campy.  In the 70’s they were ubiquitous.  Chugging up I-95, loping along the straightaway across Kansas, struggling up through the Eisenhower Tunnel over the Rockies…the Bus was always there.  In its original drab tan, or painted in reds, purples, yellow, greens, blues, the bus became a totem of its generation, the hippie generation, which was, not quite accidentally, also the Baby Boom generation.

Yes, those were boomers in all that hair and sleeveless tees, trailing the sweet sweet odor of euphoria.  Almost more than the weed, the VW Bus (and its baby brother, the Beetle) represented Freedom, Escape from Normality, and a whole new way of thinking: Out With the Old, Up With the Young!  It was all about breaking with the past and, more than that, with Leaving Home….Let’s get outta here!  Gotta go now, sayonara, there’s new lands to see, new experiences to conquer.

The reason for all this enthusiasm, this wanderlust, comes down to one great contributing factor, which can be described briefly:  the Great Tit.

In his book, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, Avi Tuschman describes studies done of dispersal distribution of the British bird, the Great Tit.  A wider dispersal area, it seems, encourages outbreeding–mating with a wider genetic pool, while a narrow dispersal area encourages inbreeding, leading to “inbreeding depression,” or a lowering of evolutionary fitness.  Similarly, other animals’ breeding patterns encourage outgroup breeding: younger male wolf-cubs are encouraged to leave their homes and find new hunting areas, while firstborns generally stay within their home country.

**other examples to follow**

With overpopulation, the supernumeric members of the tribe–generally the younger, who are not at that time contributing as much to the group–are forced, or asked nicely, to leave.  And what did the Baby Boom generation face, but overpopulation?  They faced a superabundance of competitors, of people just like them, and found it advantageous to leave the home area and look for opportunities among other groups and with new cadres of available mates.  Didn’t the VW Bus make for a convenient way to make this happen?

In other studies, it’s been found that first-borns tend to stay at home, while their younger syblings are more likely to leave, having gotten less attention from the parents and in search of opportunity.  The stay-at-homes also tend to be more conservative (well yes, staying put is a really conservative trait), whole those that leave are more liberal (read ‘adventurous’) and open to new experiences.

What evolutionary advantages are there to a conservative viewpoint?

Well, your conservative soul is hesitant to leave home, or to accept members from outside his clan or tribe. So he’s not so likely to take one for his mate.  This avoids inbreeding; where a recessive gene that causes an undesirable trait–such as sickle cell anemia–has a higher chance of joining fwith another copy of the recessive gene, and thus dominating to express the bad trait.

The insular society willl be more susceptible to a reduction in genetic variation, making it more vulnerable to pathogens, diseases, that it hasn’t encountered before, within the group.

Within inbreeding groups, there is a higher rate of death among newbors, til the age of five.  So eventually the inbreeding group will tend to die out, unless a greater degree of fecundity is achieved in the female population, but this doesn’t seem to occur; the inbreeders have a lower rate of conception and inplantation. (p. 142). Inbreeding is marrying with your first cousin, or closer.

Outbreeding, on the other hand (exsanguinuity), will bring resistant genes into the population.

“Embodied cognition” is the concept of your mental state being affected by your physical state, in subtle ways that you’re not aware of.  For instance, if you’re holding a warm drink, you’re likely to express positive feelings about others–whereas holding a cold drink gives you negative feelings.  A disgusting smell in the room will cause you to be negative to ideas that are presented to you.  Using a heavy clipboard makes you more serious about your answers to polls.  Drinking a bitter liquid makes you harshly judgemental.

Voting in a church produces more conservative voting patterns.

Just about all the polling places in South Carolina are in church buildings.

200,000 years of evolutionary development as human beings, and 200,000 years of  language evolution!  Our language changes with the changes that devlope in our social relationships.  There are those who say that language could develop only when there was a level of trust among people: words are symbols, referents, mere sounds that point to an external reality that is not necessarily present at the time of speaking those words.  As trust develops, society changes, too; trust leads to openness, which allows us to welcome strangers in our midst.  Welcoming strangers is a liberal trait.

Why is it the case that first-born children have the propensity to be conservative?  Conservative in dress, in taste, in music, in politics?

According to Avi Tuschman in his book Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, the first offspring is born with all the attention of the parents directed at him; and it is incumbent upon him to keep that attention by catering to the demands of his parents.  The first-born will be responsible, will obey the rules.

When another offspring comes along, staying loyal to the parental authority figure is the first-born’s method of trying to maintain the beneficence that had been flowing toward him alone, but which now is being split with a younger sibling. So remaining true to the old ways is the first-born’s best tactic for self preservation.

The younger sibling, though, can’t use that same tactic as well, but is forced to develop new tactics for getting attention: crying helps at first, but gets annoying; better to develop skills and interests that haven’t been tried before within the family, and so get attention and affection.  Going outside the family, for new interests, becomes the preferred modus operandi.  This leads to the development of an openness to the novel, to the original, to the world outside the family, and perhaps to leaving for parts of the world far from the place of birth.

The first-born, however, is much more likely to stay by his mother’s side, to develop a distaste for things different, to prefer the same old same old to the dangers of the novel.

Jonathan Haidt, Edge magazine September 2008,”WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN”:

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany’s best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity”—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

In explaining Hobbes’s  Leviathon, that would be equivelant to ‘The government of the United States.’

Whoah!  For Thomas Hobbes, the Leviathon, the power that held together society my our mutual consent, had to be fa monarch.  Hobbbes hated Democracy, in all its forms.  A strong ruler, a despot even, was preferred by Hobbes to democracy.  In this way Hobbes showed his true strongly conservative self.  If he imagined society as like a family, it was a family with a very strict Father figure, one who controlled us with an iron hand.

Charlie Stross, quoted in Hullabaloo:

I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).