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Judith Donath gave a presentation for the Berkman Cooperation group that I went to on Monday.

Basically, Judith is interested in using insights from signaling theory to help create richer online communities and to facilitate online communication.  She’s currently writing a book on that subject.

Signaling theory is a rapidly growing sub-discipline in evolutionary biology, but it has really fascinating implications and applications throughout the human social world.  The basic idea is that organisms evolve in all kinds of ways to send signals, with the purpose of altering behavior of other organisms in their environment.  The signals could be anything from a brightly colored tree-frog signaling that it is poisonous to avoid predation, to a peacock signaling its fitness to a mate, to a human signaling wealth via conspicuous consumption.  Pheromones, birdsong, coloration, fashion — nearly everything in nature signals something to some organism.

Sexual selection can drive signals to some really absurd lengths.  Peahens drove male peacocks to evolve completely gaudy and useless plumage (this photo is incredible) even though this actually puts the peacocks at a greater risk for predation.  I remember as an undergrad reading that female bullfrogs will choose a mate based on the pitch at which the male bullfrog croaks, and evolution is pushing them toward a particular pitch and vibrato.

Because signals have survival value and are crucial within sexual selection, it is often worthwhile for organisms to signal dishonestly, which also sets of some really fascinating arms races.  There are a number of non-poisonous butterflies, for example, that have adapted to match the color scheme of poisonous butterflies so that predators will ignore them.  Judith gave the example of tigers, who claim territory and attract mates scratching trees to demonstrate their height.  Taller tigers frighten away potential competitors and attract mates in this way.  But some shorter tigers have discovered that they can jump and claw trees at a higher point than even the tallest tigers can normally reach, making the signal less reliable.

Humans have come up with all kinds of ways to signal that they’re more fit or attractive than they actually are (lies, make-up, surgery, conspicuous consumption, status markers, etc.), and these signals produce real social and biological consequences.  Easy to copy social signals sometimes get paired with high sanctions to keep people honest (counterfeit money gets you sent to jail, faked diplomas get you fired, etc.).

Because dishonest signals are all over nature, and organisms (and humans) tend to develop signals that are harder to reproduce or falsify.  Amotz Zahavi was the first to formalize this observation in the handicap principle, which states that in order for a signal to be reliable, that signal has to be costly, i.e. either risky or hard to replicate.  In order for signals to have any adaptive benefit and become prevalent through evolution, they have to communicate something that is hard to fake.  More recently, mathematical models have been developed to model and express concept more precisely.

The examples multiply almost endlessly when you start considering human signaling.  Judith Donath devoted a large portion of her presentation to showing that fashion serves as a signaling system that communicates leisure, taste, wealth, attractiveness, one’s attitude toward risk/convention, and a number of other traits with social and sexual significance.  Because keeping fashionable requires a lot of inside knowledge and money, it’s a pretty reliable indicator.

What’s interesting about this is that the fashion industry is able to very successfully capitalize on people’s underlying desire to signal these traits. Because novelty is so crucial to this process, however, fashion has a forever shortening half-life. For people who really care, even something from a year or a season ago is terribly dated and unappealing. In itself that’s a fine way to signal wealth and taste, but this signaling system produces a staggering amount of waste.

I want to give some more thought (maybe in a paper?) to what signaling theory means for the legal system.  I can imagine a pretty interesting anthropological account of a primitive precursor to our legal system serving the purpose of keeping signals honest (money should indicate legitimate earning, it should be costly to replicate/imitate authority figures, etc).  There are probably a lot of legal rules that could be explained sensibly through the signaling theory language, which could provide a lot of interesting sociological/biological context.

A letter from Mark Twain to a Danish writer, Carl Thalbitzer, was printed in the most recent issue of Harper’s:

Dear Sir,

You have read me between the lines. What I have tried to do, and what I still try to do, is to allow only a little to leak out between the lines. This has been a strain upon me for thirty years. I have put this restraint upon myself and kept it there all these years to keep from breaking my wife’s heart, whose contentment I value above the salvation of the human race. This is a confession that in building  a wall across my Nile and damning my feelings and opinions behind it, and trying to caulk the leaks, I am not actuated by principle, but by something much stronger—sentiment.

I shall continue to leak, but shall not write the book unless I survive my wife—which I hope will not happen.

I believe that many a person has examined man with a microscope in every age of the world; has found that he did not even resemble the creature he was pretending to be; has perceived that a civilization not proper matter for derision has always been and must always remain impossible to him–and has put away his microscope and kept his mouth shut. Perhaps because the microscopist (besides having an influential wife) was built like the rest of the human race—ninety-nine parts of him being moral cowardice. I am such a person myself. I used my microscope during fifteen years, and then put the result on paper five years ago. Whenever I wish to account for any new outbreak of hypocrisy, stupidity, or crime on the part of the race, I get out that manuscript and read it, and am consoled, perceiving that the outbreak was in obedience to the law of man’s make, and was not preventable. My wife does not allow this manuscript to be published, and as ninety-nine parts of me forbid me to make myself comprehensively and uncompromisingly odious, it has not been difficult to persuade me to restrict the reading of it to myself! But you shall read it when you come to see me; then perhaps you will believe with me that civilizations are not realities, but only dreams; dreams of the mind, not of the heart, and therefore fictitious, and perishable; that they have never affected the heart and therefore have made no valuable progress; that the heart remains today what it always was, as intimacy with any savage tribe will show. Indeed the average of the human brain is not a shade higher today than it was in Egyptian times ten thousand years ago.

All this elaborate explanation of why I am not likely to write that book which you speak of amounts to this, when boiled down: ninety-nine parts of me are afraid, and my wife, who is the bulk of the remaining fraction forbids it.

Sincerely Yours,
S.L.Clemens
Riverdale, NY

The manuscript Twain refers to in the letter was published two years after the death of his wife, Olivia Langdon, as the essay What Is Man?

I immediately thought of Charles Darwin after reading this.  It’s been observed before that his delay in publishing The Origin of Species was at least in part motivated by his desire to conceal his (lack of) religious beliefs to avoid hurting his wife, Emma.  And if Alfred Russel Wallace hadn’t been prepared to publish an evolutionary theory of his own, it’s entirely plausible that Darwin would have, like Twain, preferred to have survived his wife before publishing.

It makes you wonder, how many revolutionary thoughts or acts have been buried out of consideration for people’s lovers.  Nietzsche is unthinkable except as a bachelor.  Gandhi was married.  So was Che Guevara, but after he was already stirring up revolutions.  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly and others doubtless even drew encouragement from their spouses.  Then there is that whole category of artists who just treat their lovers as replaceable or at least less important than their work (e.g., Picasso, Rilke, the rock-star persona, etc.).

I know their are probably countless examples on both sides, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that single people tend to take more/bigger risks.

This book presents evidence that people with older brothers and sisters are more likely to be revolutionaries or creative pioneers than their older siblings.  I’d be really interested to know how having a more-or-less lifelong mate impacts risk-taking and resistance to authority and the status-quo.

I dressed up as Malcom Gladwell for Halloween (wig, Coldplay t-shirt, blue-blazer).  I was a little surprised that only a handful of people recognized what I was going for.  A few people said it was spot on, but it turns out his appearance is less well known than his books.

Since Halloween, I’ve actually grown much more sympathetic toward Gladwell.  He’s been getting killed in the press since his most recent book, What the Dog Saw.  There’s a good summary of the most recent round of Gladwell bashing at CJR called Criticism of Gladwell Reaches Tipping Point.  He was on Colbert the other night, and his discomfort was visible and hard to watch.

One of the more poignant recent critiques came from Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist.  His book review in the NY Times last week called out the banalities, statistical sloppiness, and over-reliance on anecdote that characterizes Gladwell’s writing.  Pinker identifies what he calls the Igon Value Problem, which is “when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.”  The problem is named after Gladwell’s mis-transcription of the linear algebra concept, the eigenvalue.

Even if he’s not entirely rigorous or systematic, Gladwell is insightful and entertaining.  The concept of a tipping point is enormously useful for understanding a range of social and economic phenomena.  Reading him, I’m reminded of Emerson’s quote: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.”  Pinker wouldn’t go that far and only calls him a minor genius, but Gladwell has plenty of ideas that I wish I’d turned into best-sellers first.

There is some irony to all this criticism.  Steven Pinker, while rooted in an academic discipline, is something of a popularizer and pop-culture statistician himself.  I’m not the only one to muse that they’re competing to be the same persona.  They even have the same haircut.  SEED ran a piece covering the face-off here, with an apt graphic by Mike Pick:

I actually saw Pinker talk at a SALMS event on the HLS campus earlier this week about a forthcoming book on the worldwide decline in physical violence.  I’ve heard many of these statistics before, but the basic point of his talk was to show that humanity is actually less violent than it used to be.  And he established his point by combining statistics (declines in urban violence, chances of a male dying in a war were lower in the 20th century than any point in human history) and anecdotes (fewer countries have the death penalty, torture devices are now seen as barbaric, public torture is essentially non-existent).

Pinker seems to have identified a straw man, a group of people who deny that humanity is more peaceful than it used to be.  He seems more focused on discrediting the idea that the present is worse than the past rather than trying to get to the more interesting underlying causes of this well-documented decrease in violence.  This new work is pretty clearly motivated by his larger pro-Enlightenment project to discredit the Rousseauian noble-savage idea and to challenge academics in humanities departments who reject a biological component to human nature (like those who pushed for Larry Summers’s resignation).

I am on his side in believing in the evolutionary foundations for our behaviors, and I am a huge fan of his work on language.  But as a student pointed out in the Q&A, it might be that Pinker’s critics wouldn’t deny that the world is less violent: they are trying to find a rhetoric to keep people motivated and to define progress in ways that best serve their more immediate concerns.

Many of the more interesting questions about why we’re less violent didn’t really get much treatment in the talk.  For example: is it because we are more socially interconnected? because we are more economically co-dependent? because there higher risks of catastrophic escalation to nuclear destruction? because we experience enough violence vicariously through entertainment?  Maybe he’ll get into this more by the time the book goes to print.  The more interesting questions are a lot harder to answer with statistics, and I’d be curious to see what Gladwell would write about this.

I took a research assistant job this semester that’s recently given me an opportunity to refamiliarize myself with Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression.  I remember thinking when I first read the book as an undergraduate that the early chapters were some of the best pieces of science writing I’d ever come across.  Lorenz writes about the ritualized intra-species aggression in tropical fish in beautiful, colorful language, told from his perspective as a diver.  And at the same time he precisely documents the territorial, evolved motivations underlying their behavior.

Lorenz is arguably the founder of ethology and his work was crucial to the development of biological psychology (he also has the unfortunate legacy of having been a Heidegger-type Nazi sympathiser). One of his more famous findings was about critical period imprinting in geese and ducks — he showed that freshly hatched geese will identify any stimulus as their mother and follow it around as long as it’s there during the first few days of their lives.

In researching this topic (aggression), I’m still constantly surprised at how little of the psychological literature takes into account the biological underpinnings of such an obviously evolved behavior.

David Barash wrote an amazing article called The Targets of Aggression for the Chronicle Review a few years back, which also suggests ways in which aggression is a coping mechanism for intense stress or pain.  Unfortunately, they now require subscription to access, but I did find this quote:

Place a rat in a cage with an electrified floor and subject it to repeated shocks. Not surprisingly, the poor animal will show many signs of stress, at first flinging itself against the walls with each shock. But after a while, it just sits there apathetically, showing no inclination to escape from its painful prison. When autopsied, the animal will be found to have oversized adrenal glands and, frequently, stomach ulcers, both indicating serious stress.

Finally, put two rats in the electrified cage. Shock them both. They snarl and fight. Do it again, and keep doing it; they keep fighting. Yet at autopsy, their adrenal glands are normal, and, moreover, even though they have experienced numerous shocks, they have no ulcers. When animals respond to stress and pain by redirecting their aggression outside themselves, whether biting a stick or, better yet, another individual, it appears that they are protecting themselves from stress. By passing their pain along, such animals minister to their own needs. Although a far cry from being ethically “good,” it is definitely “natural.”

I saw Eliot Spitzer speak on the undergraduate campus yesterday (there’s a short clip here).  The talk was part of speaker series Prof. Larry Lessig has arranged for the recently founded “Project on Institutional Corruption” at the Harvard Center for Ethics.

People around school (and in the media) seem to enjoy pointing out the irony of having Spitzer deliver a talk on professional ethics.  I find this response incredibly frustrating and facile.  First of all, what better perspective is there for evaluating ethics than someone who has made questionable decisions and suffered the political and societal consequences?  Secondly, Eliot Spitzer (most clearly in his time as NY Attorney General) has done as much as anyone in the legal profession to directly confront Wall Street and corporate malfeasance.  He holds people to a high ethical standard, and he’s unafraid of taking risks (maybe to a fault).  Without condoning his hypocrisy or his decision to sleep with a prostitute, I think his work and his perspective on corporate behavior should be an inspiration to lawyers and anyone else.

With that said, it was disappointing, if not unsurprising, that Mr. Spitzer did not use the ethics talk as opportunity to examine his own behavior and the institutional conflict that it represents.

The talk, entitled “From Ayn Rand to Ken Feinberg — How Quickly the Paradigm Shifts. What Should Be the Rationale for Government Participation in the Market?”, argued that governments should step in and regulate when the market has driven companies to unethical practices, particularly now that we know that these practices can create system-wide risk.

Spitzer gave examples from his time as AG that argue this larger point.  He described his suit against GlaxoSmithKline over its decision to market the drug Plaxil to teenagers, an example of market incentives running counter to any obligation to make consumers and doctors aware of the health risks associated with their drugs.

Another still common practice that Spitzer tackled is the conflict of interests inherent in the entire investment banking industry.  These organizations simultaneously underwrite investments and then want the market to value these investments at a higher price.  One arm is paid say “this investment is worth X”, and the other arm is committed to convincing everyone else that it’s worth more than X.  He reached a settlement back in 2002 with 10 of the largest investment banks on the more specific issue of “spinning”, a particularly egregious practice of paying affiliated firms in stock to help you overstate the price of that same stock.  This is all strikingly similar to the credit rating industry, who depend exclusively on the business of the firms whose products they rate.  They’re paid to say what banks want to hear.

Another area he was particularly troubled by is corporate governance — boards and executives have little fiduciary duty to their stockholders, and stockholders exercise increasingly little control over the board or the company’s decisions.  The actual owners of a company have a very limited ability to influence that company, and if things start going bad, their only incentive is to sell stock, not to see their company through.

It’s also patently absurd, as Spitzer pointed out, to think CEOs are worth 10 times more now than they were a decade ago, but their compensation as a ratio to that of the average employee has increased by more than that (from 30-1 to over 550-1).  I think it would a terrible understatement to just say that shareholder incentives and board/executive incentives are unaligned.  Executive pay is not a functioning market.

There was a whole other portion of his talk that focused on the current bailout, the moral hazard, the lack of a plan, and the fleecing of taxpayers, which I want to write more on but will have to get to later.  I thought it was summarized well when he said, “We’ve socialized risk and privatized gain.”

I’m about to bike over to a screening of Food, Inc. on campus, but I’m feeling bad for having neglected my blog for this long.

I was actually in part inspired to rekindle my efforts here by Davit Lat (of www.AboveTheLaw.com fame) and his interview at The Blackbook Legal Blog.  I was keeping myself away for a combination of personal reasons and the consensus at school (alluded to in the Blackbook link) that keeping a blog can only hurt one’s jobs prospects.  I think this is only true if one says idiotic things or posts ridiculous pictures of oneself, neither of which I’m really at risk of doing.  Plus honestly, if I can’t write about my interests in my spare time, I’m not convinced that the work that blogging forces me to forgo will be felt as much of a loss anyway.

On a completely unrelated note, I recently had an article run in the Harvard Law Record.  After spending a few post-college years regretting never publishing in the Michigan Daily, I can finally take comfort in the fact that I’ve published in a student paper.  The article even got a kind mention over at The Situationist.

“I look for myself but do not find myself.  I belong to chrysanthemum hours, clearly lined up in long rows of vases.  I must make something decorative of my soul.
I don’t know what overly pomous and well-chosen details define the substance of my spirit.  My love for the ornamental exists, no doubt, because I feel in it something identical to the substance of my soul.”

I meant to say something about it when I saved this post as a draft back in June, but this website has been sitting idle for a while now.  Recently I have been reading Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class for inspiration for a paper I’m writing in entertainment law, so my associations are all about conspicuous consumption and art as identity and social-ranking.

I do wonder pretty often, how strange it is that associations with things out in the world is about all we get to define ourselves.  It appears I’m even doing it here, attempting to link myself somehow with Pessoa and his writings.  If it’s inescapable, it seems best to be deliberate in choosing.  I’m going to stop at that before I get too far from what Pessoa is conveying here.

Through my internship this summer with the Exoneration Initiative, I’ve been in Westchester this week to observe post-conviction hearings for a client who was convicted of a double-homicide.  He’s been in police custody for nearly 9 years and faces, at the least, another 42 years in prison.  I have almost no doubt in my mind that he is absolutely innocent.

There’s a lot I want to write about this case and EXI’s work in general, but what’s really on my mind is a conversation from a reading group I was part of this past fall, led by Alan Stone.  Despite having a mostly secular outlook, Prof. Stone got into a discussion about believing in grace, moments of an almost divine compassion and recognition of a common humanity.  I think the example he gave was of Germans and British during World War I, taking a break from the shooting on Christmas day and exchanging gifts, playing soccer, and drinking together in the no-man’s-land between the trenches.

During the hearings, an ex-girlfriend of the defendant (who refused to testify in his first two trials and had to be subpoenaed to be there this week) came in and testified.  She’d clearly had a lot of problems with the defendant and his family and a lot of other reasons for not wanting to testify.  But after they swore her in and asked her to identify the defendant, there was a moment where she looked at him with the look of an old lover looking back at someone from her past, and she answered everything they asked her and swore to the court she’d been with him in a different state when those murders happened, hundreds of miles away.

All the other witnesses and evidence have been coming out the same way, but seeing this woman overcome all her reluctance and visible resentment to give this man his life back — it might be the closest thing I’ve seen to that idea of grace, and I had chills to see it.  It’s hard for me to even convey how invested I am already in this man’s case and how crushed I’d be if his motion isn’t granted.

Instead of competing for law review a few weeks ago during my last days in Cambridge, I picked up a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and read that instead.  I always liked The Sun Also Rises the best of everything Hemingway wrote, and for scenes of the Paris cafes, Movable Feast isn’t quite as exciting.  The last quarter of the book though, where he writes about knowing F. Scott Fitzgerald, is devastating every time.

It’s almost like the Tolstoy platitude about unhappy families.  Part of me just can’t help being affected by dysfunctional couples.  Clearly Zelda possessed some undeniable charm.  I can’t help thinking what hell F. Scott must have gone through trying to secure a stable, domestic love from an eccentric (certifiably insane) woman who could never feel in those terms.  And when you hear Fitzgerald admit that he’d never even slept with another woman, The Great Gatsby becomes all the more poignant and personal.  This hung-up romantic who’d do anything for this one girl, who doesn’t even see other women, is him.  It’s heartrending to think that Scott was always and only in love with that one woman and how much they struggled for any kind of sustained happiness or peace of mind.

Hemingway is convinced that Zelda was jealous of Scott for his effortless, natural ability to write (he compared it to “the pattern of the dust on a butterfly’s wings”).  Hemmingway doesn’t quite call it deliberate, but he does thinks Zelda was trying to ruin Scott and keep their relationship in an uncertain state.  She’d supposedly interrupt his writing to get him to go out drinking so he couldn’t write at night or the next day either.  She ran off with a sailor for a year or so, but all the time was trying to make him more jealous and attentive.  And there’s a ridiculous scene that Hemingway must have reveled in writing, where Scott comes to him insecure about the size of his penis because something Zelda had said.

It’s enormously tragic that two people who love each other that much can fuck each other up so severely and not have the sense either to leave or work something out.  Such a pointless form of hell on earth.  Scott was so deeply insecure about her and his writing and already an alcohol-dependent anxious mess beneath his gilded facade (and this was 10 years before he wrote the Crack-Up).  It doesn’t sound like anything Zelda did was as intentionally destructive as Hemingway sometimes hints (he was Scott’s friend).  But these people were poison to each other and still couldn’t manage to keep themselves apart.

There’s a letter where Scott wrote Zelda, “We ruined ourselves. I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.”

I read Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony when I first worked in New York a few years ago.  The story is one I’d heard as a Catholic schoolboy:  A monk named Anthony goes to the desert to escape earthly distractions.  God tempts him with every from of hedonism and sends demons to torment him and disrupt his prayers.  Anthony performs a superhuman triumph of the will and refuses to yield to any of the temptations.  God rewards his piety by letting him hold the infant Christ-child, the only time Christ has returned to the earth since the Ascension.

I always found this probably the strangest story in the whole Catholic mythology of saints.  As a kid this is the kind of stuff that terrified me about God and now makes me concerned about the psychological harm religions (esp. Catholicism) can inflict on the minds of children.

My interest in this self-indulgently stems from the fact that St. Anthony of Padua is my namesake, as my mother reminded me every time I misplaced anything.  But it also has something to do with a mistaken narcissistic impulse to view everything in life as a temptation away from some higher purpose, which is probably why Flaubert identified with the story as well.

Back when I read the Temptations, I looked up every artists’ depection I could find online from the middle ages to today.  The temptations were an absolute blank canvas for artists to throw as many lascivious, nightmarish, ridiculous images as they could into a single painting.  People who’ve researched this much better than myself have pointed out how much these St. Anthony paintings set the table for the surrealists (Hieronymus Bosch and Dali have two of the more memorable paintings of the Temptation).

Anyway, I was reminded of all this while cleaning out some old bookmarks when I came across this site: http://www.leninimports.com/hieronymus_jerome_bosch_shop.html.  This guy is selling plastic models of the monsters from Hieronymus Bosch paintings that I’m half-tempted to order.