The Slate’s a Palimpsest
[posted by Leonard]
At Catallarchy, Patri Friedman has posted the results of an interesting study he performed. Data were taken from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth.
OBJECTIVE: The goal was to determine the relationship between the parental use of sunscreen products and the skin color of children in first grade.
…
RESULTS: … Children of High sunscreen-using parents (n=1652) had an increased risk of being light-skinned… . Of the covariates, only race was significant, but a substantial effect between parental sunscreen use and child skin color remained.CONCLUSIONS. … Understanding the mechanisms through which parental use of sunscreen are associated with skin-color risk may lead to the development of more comprehensive and better-targeted interventions.
So, use of sunscreen by parents causes light-skinnedness in children! (Don’t worry - not really.)
The prevailing ideology in social science in the 20th century was that people are blank slates. You know, that we’re completely “socially constructed”. As ideology, this appealed strongly to the left, for it implied that human societies could be reformed peacefully, and relatively easily, simply by getting to kids early and programming them to be what was desired in the brave new world.
If it’s true that the only effect parents have on kids is via the environment, correlations like that of sunscreen use and skin color are pretty hard to explain except as causation. In this case, of course, we all know that skin color is genetic. (Right?) So, we’d not pay any attention to a study like that above, even if it’s basically sound other than the conclusions. But there are still a whole lot of studies using the exact same structure, including completely ignoring the possibility of genetic influence creating correlation. (Case in point: this.) As Patri says, “any study of normal parents and children is tainted by an incredibly powerful covariate, namely genetic similarity, which causes all sorts of non-causative associations”.
In the comments, some links showing the reverse of the study that Patri is criticizing. Reposting a commentor (Jason Malloy) quoting AJ Stunkard: “We conclude that genetic influences on body-mass index are substantial, whereas the childhood environment has little or no influence. These findings corroborate and extend the results of earlier studies of twins and adoptees.”
Humanity has suffered many blows to its pride at the hands of science. First our planet was unintuitively shaped. Then it was not at the center of universe. Then even the Sun was not at the center. Then even our galaxy was not special; it’s one of billions. Meanwhile, it turns out we’re not special either: we’re animals descended from animals. But through all that, we’ve held on to our feeling of uniqueness, of separation from the animals, of free will, of constructing our selves completely. The 21st century is going to see yet another in the series of blows to our human pride.
Comment by Barry —
June 6, 2006 @ 10:25 am
OK. So what?
Comment by Leonard —
June 6, 2006 @ 10:37 am
So, let’s talk about puppies! I think they’re cute! Do you like puppies?
Comment by Kieran —
June 6, 2006 @ 11:50 am
The prevailing ideology in social science in the 20th century was that people are blank slates. You know, that we’re completely “socially constructed”. As ideology, this appealed strongly to the left, for it implied that human societies could be reformed peacefully, and relatively easily, simply by getting to kids early and programming them to be what was desired in the brave new world.
It’s more accurate to say that left-wing social thought had a very strong theory of innate human nature, deriving from Marx’s analysis of alienation and ”species being”. On this view, people are social animals who derive their greatest happiness from creative, fulfilling, co-operative work done under uncoerced conditions. Much of Marx’s critique of capitalism was based on the premise that its social institutions actively prevented the fulfillment of our natures. Revolution was supposed to clear away deforming institutions and allow human nature to express itself properly.
Conversely, traditionally right-leaning economic and rational-choice thought insists that people are — or can be treated as — wholly cognitive, perfectly rational information processors with complete, consistent preferences, and argues that our institutions should be constructed as if this were an accurate representation of what human beings are like.
So the question of the role of human nature (and the pliability of human beings) in social theory is not at all as straightforward as ”left = blank-slaters, right = innate natures.”
Comment by Barry —
June 6, 2006 @ 12:48 pm
Kieran, don’t you know not to bring reality in, when somebody’s off on a perfectly good ’leftists are blank slaters’ rant?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 6, 2006 @ 4:10 pm
Sorry to burst your bubble, Barry, but Kieran isn’t bringing in reality. Blank-slatism is pretty common on the left, for the perfectly good reason that 19th century socialist non-blank-slatism it replaced was wildly racist.
First, Marx was not the main source of the left’s conception of fulfilling human activity! This is because Marx was very reluctant to speak of the world after the revolution — witness his harsh condemnations of ”utopian socialism” — and so he didn’t really say much about proper human development.
Instead, you need to start with the nineteenth century trade unionists, who wanted the workers to literally own the means of production. This strand of leftism ended when it became clear that a consequence of pure worker ownership would be inequality — workers in capital-intensive industries would earn more than workers in labor-intensive industries. At this point, the principle of equal pay won the argument, which means that leftists needed some non-incentive-based explanation of why people would be willing to work.
The explanation that won the day came from John Ruskin, William Morris (one of the founders of socialism in England), and the rest of the Arts and Crafts movement. They argued that handmade objects produced through individual craftsmanship dignified labor. The phrasing that Kieran uses — ”creative, fulfililng, cooperative work” could be ripped straight out of one of their pamphlets.
The trouble is that Ruskin and Morris were deeply influenced by Thomas Carlyle, who was one of the most enormous racists in all of history. He was himself not a socialist, but he was a violent enemy of J.S. Mill and the classical liberals. The liberals were opponents of slavery, because in economics people are rational actors inherently capable of truck and barter, and so slavery represented a violation of their human nature. (In fact, Carlyle coined the term ”dismal science” because economics rejected natural hierarchy.) Because Carlyle was the very rare few who would not be completely destroyed in an argument with J.S. Mill, his rhetoric infected everyone (left or right) who wasn’t a liberal. That’s where a lot of the racist eugenicist strain of early twentieth century socialism came from — Carlyle’s conception of human nature was invented in part to reject the equality of man.
This racist socialism seems weird to us, of course. That’s because two important things happened in the meantime. First, Lenin took power in the Soviet Union. He was a big fan of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and argued that people could be shaped to fit the social machine. Second, Mussolini left the left and invented fascism, taking racism with him. Hitler followed suit — and the Holocaust totally discredited eugenics. Lenin’s blank-slate brand of communism was close at hand for everyone on the left, especially for those who wanted to be in solidarity with those brown socialists in the third world.
So yeah, blank slaters are widespread on the left, because they aren’t total moral idiots.
Comment by Kieran —
June 6, 2006 @ 4:36 pm
Blank-slatism is pretty common on the left, for the perfectly good reason that 19th century socialist non-blank-slatism it replaced was wildly racist.
I didn’t say no leftists were blank-slaters, that would have been silly. Rather, as you partly demonstrate, each cell of a left vs right + blank-slate vs innate-nature table would be occupied.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 6, 2006 @ 5:08 pm
Kieran, if you can find me a really significant ”innate-nature” leftist thinker in the fifty years after the end of the second world war, I will buy a hat, for the specific purpose of eating it. The argument on the left was flat-out won by the blank-slaters. We might see a new innate-nature left forming in the next few years, based on the results of happiness research, evo-psych and experimental economics, but it doesn’t exist yet.
The innate-nature/blank-slate argument has been a live one on the libertarian right. That’s because the Austrian economists really, really hated the whole Chicago school mathematical rational-choice approach, and they have been extremely influential among libertarians. (Personally, I find this a little annoying, because I’m a weirdo who thinks Oskar Lange had a stronger argument than Ludwig von Mises.)
Comment by Leonard —
June 6, 2006 @ 6:49 pm
I really hope for a left that has cast off the straightjacket of blank-slatism. That is to say, a left with the ideological tools to grapple with the world as I perceive it. (I think a lot of normal people perceive it similarly, so this might help the left’s electoral prospects.)
We are animals. It’s strange to see the left so correct on the issue of teaching only evolution in the public schools, only to about-face ideologically and adopt the idea that there’s nothing to learn about the human species from evolution, as if it ended with apes.
Comment by buermann —
June 6, 2006 @ 8:02 pm
”if you can find me a really significant ’innate-nature’ leftist thinker in the fifty years after the end of the second world war, I will buy a hat, for the specific purpose of eating it”
.
There’s this thing about ”innate grammar”, but I profess knowing nothing about any of this beyond the fact that innate vs. blank does seem rather like an obviously false dichotomy. Reminds me a certain Monty Python sketch…
Comment by Walt —
June 6, 2006 @ 9:06 pm
Buermann alluded to this, but I do believe there is this figure on the left known as ”Chomsky” whose main theory pretty much requires an innate human nature.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 6, 2006 @ 9:45 pm
I could quibble and argue that Chomsky has always maintained that his linguistics work and his political work are utterly disjoint, but that would be small-minded. You’ve got a good enough counterexample for me — point conceded! I am curious whether Chomsky has ever tried to explain what he thinks the political implications of deep structure are; does anyone know?
Anyway, I’ll stand up for false dichotomies. Sometimes you need to embrace them in order to purge morally toxic beliefs. For example, making the (correct) observation that all people aren’t actually equal turns into a rationalization of oppression absurdly quickly. (Cf. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s opinion in Buck vs. Bell.) So it can be wise to believe something that’s wrong if it keeps you from believing things that are more wrong.
Comment by buermann —
June 7, 2006 @ 1:18 am
”For example, making the (correct) observation that all people aren’t actually equal turns into a rationalization of oppression absurdly quickly”
I don’t think a legal argument is adequate to deal with this, ”the law [only] does all that is needed when it does all that it can, indicates a policy, applies it to all within the lines”. It could just as easily been an oppressive policy. I’d maybe start with the blanket assertion that ”All men are created equal” - works just fine for the innate, blank, or complex (is there a null set?) - and go from there. But sure, only takes one negative example to prove a blanket assertion wrong.
Who’s the fancypants Democratic ”frame” consultant who was a student of Chomsky? Lakoff? Always talking about the political implications of something scientific like he read it in Discover, really sweet smelling BS.