The Rawness

Pickup artists have one of the best definition for charisma that I think I’ve ever heard: Charisma is the ability to suck other people into your reality. People enter into every interaction with a frame: for example a dominant frame, a submissive frame, a negative frame, a positive frame, whatever. Every interaction between two people is a collision of frames. What happens when the two frames collide determines the dynamic between the two people.

For example, when an aggressively hostile frame meets a submissive and meek frame, the dynamic is dominance or outright bullying. Another way to dominate without resorting to outright bullying is to have a confident, yet larger than life frame that attracts people and sucks them into your reality. This dynamic is charisma.

If you actively and overtly try too hard to actively drag people into your reality, you’ll drive them away because you’re being too pushy or come off desperate or insecure. People who want to be charismatic but keep failing often can’t tell the difference between sucking people into their reality by being appealing and interesting and imposing their reality on people by being loud, bragadocious and eager to impress. The frame needed for charisma is like the movie Field of Dreams: if you build it right, people will come on their own, almost unconsciously and against their will. It’s the difference between “Hey, I’m acting crazy and over-the-top because I think it will impress you and I want you to like me” and “Hey, I’m acting crazy and over-the-top because that’s unapologetically who I am and what I enjoy. I’m just bringing you along for the ride, if you want to come. If not, no skin off my back.”

Some people use charm and charisma interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing. Charm is when you try to get people to like you. When you have charisma, though, people try to get you to like them. Charm is an external set of behaviors calculated to impress people. Charisma is an internalized way of being that naturally makes people want to impress you.

Using rap as an example, this is one reason why I think in the hip-hop world Nas was always inferior overall as a public persona to Jay-Z, regardless of what you may think of their individual talents.

Two great pieces on the level of unconscious genius that goes into fast-paced athletics.

First is one from the blog The Situationist. It uses baseball players as a specific example.

The other is an older, but related piece from the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Physical Genius.”

Not much commentary from me on this. Both links are pretty self-explanatory.

I predict a lot of people will be talking about Fox’s new show Moment of Truth. Yes, it looks like typical Fox tackiness. Yes, it looks controversial, exploitative and in poor taste. But damn if I’m not going to watch every last minute!

As a guy who’s into human nature and the raw, unfiltered truth, this show will be like crack to me if done right. I love the tagline too: “Controversy comes to Fox!” When does controversy ever fucking leave Fox?

Here are some previews:

My wife feels like the contestants are being expoited and embarassed. But my take on it, if these people know the premise and are willing to sell their dignity for some cash and fame, then they deserve to be made uncomfortable for our entertainment.Show premieres on January 23. Thoughts?

UPDATED: Desiree in the comments section left this gem:

I read somewhere that they had a show very similar to this in another country. I want to say somewhere in South America, but it could?ve been Europe?whatever that is unimportant. The impotant part was that they had to cancel the show when a woman confessed she paid someone to try and kill her husband. Now THAT is gangsta.

It sounded so crazy that I thought it had to be an urban legend. I did a little google checking and lo and behold that craziness really did happen! Check it out:

The hit Colombia TV game show, in which contestants submitting to a lie-detector test must truthfully answer 21 increasingly invasive questions to win US$50,000 (?35,000), has been canceled by Caracol Television after a contestant admitted on air to hiring a hit man to kill her husband. Tuesday was the show’s final day.

However a U.S version called “Moment of the Truth” is expected to be launched on the Fox network in the coming months along with spin-offs in England, Australia, Germany, Italy and Spain, according to Howard Schultz, the Los Angeles-based creator of the show.

If anyone can track down the Youtube for this, please pass it along.

Somewhat sad news. Chess champion Bobby Fischer is dead. The story of his life is one of great triumph followed by great tragedy:

Fisher went on to become a bizarre, shadowy figure (hence the irony of the title of the 1993 movie about a child chess prodigy, Searching for Bobby Fischer). Over the years, his eccentricity seemed to blossom into full-blown madness as he railed against the United States, went on anti-Semitic tirades (although his mother was Jewish) and was essentially in exile from the U.S. after breaking sanctions by playing a match in Yugoslavia.

Too often, in the world of competitions, a person reaches the pinnacle of his or her life at a very young age. And nothing after that can ever match what they did at age 30 or 25 or even 18. That’s tough. But if they handle the reality with grace and intelligence, what they did in their youth can be a springboard. In the case of Fischer, who was on top of the world at age 29, it didn’t have to work out the way it did. Chess isn’t that kind of game. You can be superb for years. In fact, Fischer was. But there were other things going on — invisible demons is the best way to put it, I guess — that contributed to making him a victim of his own early phenomenal success.

Long, long before the end, Bobby Fischer had lost himself, never to be found again.

I find the contrast between Fischer and a later American chess champion Josh Waitzkin to be fascinating. Josh Waitzkin was the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer and also had his problems with early chess celebrity. But unlike Fischer, Waitzkin is very well-adjusted and a lot less eccentric. He has given up chess, but is now a world champion martial artist and author.

This story reminded me of this piece, where I talked about how loving something motivates you to master it, but mastering it too well, or solving the mystery, causes you to stop loving it. I called it the mystery/mastery paradox. You have to mentally reframe the challenge in order to stay engaged. Like once you figure out a game inside out, you change your focus to beating other masters of the game to stay engaged. Once you beat the other masters of the game, you may focus on spreading your fame or writing books about the game. It’s still about the original game, but only tangentially. I think this is what led Michael Jordan to try baseball for a while.

I don’t know much about Bobby Fischer’s life, but maybe he didn’t cultivate anything besides chess. From what I know, it was an all-consuming passion for him from a very young age. Maybe when he fell into his own mystery/mastery paradox and it stopped being fun for him, he had no other outlet to switch to, because being so consumed with chess from so young never allowed him to figure out his identity outside of chess.

At some point, however, it seems Josh Waitzkin did figure out his identity outside of chess. He explains it in this NY1 profile he did:

About ten years ago, to escape the phenomenon of, “Hey, you’re the ?Searching for Bobby Fischer? guy!” he spent a year living in Slovenia and traveling around Europe.

And he came to a realization.

“Transitional moments were affecting me in chess and in life. And when I took them on in one, it helped me with the other,? said Waitzkin. ?And so that became my manner of studying of chess, which was to look at my psychological being was manifesting itself over the board. So that kind of led to this way of thinking about chess, life, tai chi, the martial arts, in a manner which was basically looking for thematic interconnections, as opposed to looking at one art at a time.?…

“I didn’t grow up learning chess or competing in a protected environment,? says Waitzkin. ?I grew up kind of in a raw environment and that’s been kind of central to my life in all these things, because life as a competitor is brutal.”….

“It caught up to me, and I started to become externalized through the chess, which was very sad, very sad,? says Waitzkin. “When you?re defined by something from the age of six on, the idea of letting that go and redefining yourself completely, it?s naked and raw and terrifying.?

But the transition was eased when the Columbia University graduate discovered tai chi, and his new passion resulted in an international championship in 2004.

Now his goal is to use these two parts of his life to create a multi-disciplinary learning center for kids.

So he went from competitive chess to martial arts champion. And note how, as he masters martial arts, he already sets up his next challenge, his plan for a multi-disciplinary learning center for kids. I think this technique he has of setting up his next challenge ahead of time shows how he’s able to avoid the mystery/mastery paradox. He realizes when he’s falling out of love with something and as he masters it, he sets up the next challenge for himself.

I also think that’s why celebrities like Michael Jackson, and Bobby Fischer go insane once they achieve their goals. They only focus on mastering one thing, and once they achieve it and naturally start to fall out of love with it and it just becomes a grinding job or crushing responsibility, they have nothing else to channel their energy into. They hate what their doing, but they also love the security blanket of knowing they have an area they have mastered and are afraid to leave it behind despite how unfulfilling it has now become.

Not being prepared to channel your energies into something else is also what I think contributes to the alcoholism of the guy in this story who turned his hobby into a job, along with other people who turned to substance abuse after they turned their passion into a career and hit the top. The problem wasn’t turning their passion or hobby into a career, it was not being prepared for what the void that would come up once they mastered that hobby (doing something for a living is the ultimate form of mastery I think). They became victims of the mystery/mastery paradox.

I have been recording American Idol on my DVR, but I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. I’m really not enthused about the show anymore after an incredibly lackluster last season. I prefer the criminally underrated sister show So You Think You Can Dance, but since Idol is the show people talk about at the water cooler, I feel obligated to keep up with it.

I’m not always good at picking who’ll win, but I can usually tell at least one type of singer who’ll always lose, and that would be the dominating strong starters. Whenever people start incredibly strong early on in the auditions, whether it’s Paris Bennett or Melinda Doolittle or whoever, they’re usually doomed to lose. The people who usually win Idol or any reality competition show for that matter are usually the ones who started off under the radar and consistently gave the impression of improvement. And the people who dominated or were frontrunners from the start usually don’t win.

I think it has something to do with how our senses work. See, our senses aren’t geared toward noticing objects, smells and temperature. They’re geared toward noticing changes and contrast in objects, smells and temperature. It’s a subtle but important difference. The more the external stimuli change, the more our senses pick them up. For example, have you ever noticed that if you are sitting in a room, you don’t notice a certain smell? Yet if you leave the room and come back in, suddenly the smell is suddenly obvious? Same with temperature. If you just walk into a room, you’re more sensitive to the temperature because it’s a big change from the temperature outside, but once you’re in the same room long enough you notice the temperature less. With sound, we’re picking up vibrations, or movements in the air. Even when we’re watching still objects, what’s actually happening is that your eye is vibrating across the image. That’s right, our eyes are constantly vibrating on a minute level that we can’t notice, and this vibrating movement is what helps us see still objects. To illustrate this, there’s actually a laser projector that can project images onto an eyeball while tracking and matching the eyeball’s vibration. And what happens is that your eye only see the images for a split second and then they disappear. Color doesn’t exist by itself even. What we see as color is created by contrasting relationships – what the color is next to, what surrounds it. Fixed colors don’t exist. In a different context they will be changed completely.

As a survival mechanism, it makes sense for us to be more aware of things that are changing than things that are remaining the same. Paying extra attention to the changes in your environment lets you know when danger is afoot. At one point in human history there may have been human beings who gave static conditions the same importance as changing conditions, and if so, they’d have ended up weeded out of the gene pool. A new predator could have entered their field of vision and started moving toward them, and they wouldn’t pay extra attention to them. The smell of toxic chemicals could have entered a room and they wouldn’t have given it the exact same importance as the smell already in the room. Natural selection would have weeded them out. The fact that our senses register changes in conditions more than they register static conditions was an important survival tool that allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce. We wouldn’t be here today if our ancestors’ senses didn’t work this way.

To our bodies, if a condition exists in our environment, remains there over time and still hasn’t injured or killed us, it starts getting categorized as safe. By categorizing it as safe and ignoring it to a degree, this frees up our senses to focus on new elements that enter our environment or changes that happen around us, the things we have not categorized as safe yet.

Here’s another way to illustrate it if you don’t believe me. Say I show you a pair of shoes, describe the brand, materials and craftsmanship and tell you the cost is $100. Then I tell you they were originally $700 last week. That $100 shoe would register as a great value. Now say I gave you the same description of the shoes, down to the brand, materials and craftsmanship, and told you the cost was $100, but I told you instead that the original price was $50. Now you’d feel like you were getting ripped off. Same shoe, same quality, same price, but you can’t judge it in a vacuum, you can only judge it in contrast to something else. How many times have you bought something at a price you normally wouldn’t just because it was a huge drop in price? Advertisers and retail people call this the contrast principle.

Or imagine two sibling students. One gets straight As. The other gets straight Fs. One day the A student comes home with her usual A, while the F student comes how with a surprising C for once. The A student has the higher grade, an A, but the F student’s latest grade will register more strongly and be more noticeable because it’s a greater change. This is unfair to the A student, because given that she’s already at the top, how much more can she improve? Maybe get an A+? That’s about it. It’s all about change, change, change, and when you start off with perfection, the only change you have available to you is downward change. So those are your two choices when you’re perfect: stay perfect and get taken for granted, or change in the downward direction and have it register negatively with people.

Despite thousands of years of technological and societal advancement, our senses still work the same way as they ever did. And that goes a long way to explaining why top performers don’t win American Idol. When we first see them, they overload our senses. We go right from seeing a mediocre applicant and low-key moments to incredibly powerful vocal. Our senses are incredibly stimulated. Week after week of that brilliance, our senses categorize it as “safe” and become less responsive to it. Since the room for improvement is so small, the only option they have to register as strongly with our senses is a drastic drop in quality, except that will register in a negative way, which further defeats the purpose of winning.

And this is why I actually cringe when an American Idol contestant knocks it out of the park too strongly during the audition phase. The judges will gush at first, rave, make a huge deal, and then their senses adjust to it and it all becomes a little less impressive each time. They start criticizing them for not improving as much as the other people (which is unfair because it’s harder to improve on excellence than it is to improve on mediocre or average). The audience starts takes their greatness for granted and votes for the improving underdogs instead. In every season of American Idol that I’ve seen (I haven’t seen many), it’s never the early leader that wins the whole shebang. It’s the biggest improver. Because as I described, we’re programmed to primarily notice change, and it’s harder for excellence to change in a positive direction. Even Kelly Clarkson, the most successful Idol to date, did not dominate right away. She was considered underwhelming by the judges at first and improved a lot every week.

So when I finally get around to watching Idol on my DVR, and I see the knockout supertalent that gets pegged early on to win the whole thing, I know they’ll end up losing eventually. As unfair as it seems, overachieving and early excellence don’t always pay off.

Saw a post over at the gaping void. It’s a story about a guy who was great at his hobby, ended up making it into a career, and became a raging alcoholic that lost it all.

And here, supposedly, is the moral of the story:

“That’s why you should never turn your hobby into your job,” said one of my friends, someone far older and wiser than me. “Before, this man had a job and a hobby. Now suddenly, he’s just got the job, but no hobby anymore. But a man needs both, you see. And now what does this man, who’s always had a hobby, do with his time?

My friend held up his glass.

“Answer: Drink.”

Make of this what you will.

It is an interesting point and all, but why not just replace the old hobby with a new hobby instead of becoming a fucking drunk? Color me skeptical.

One goal I had with this blog was not to just talk at people like a know-it-all. What I really wanted to do was to create open and honest two-way communication with total strangers. I wanted to have a real exchange of ideas with people and learn as much from commenters as they hopefully learned from me.

That’s why I occasionally want to do a piece like this, where I ask the commenters to educate me on something. This is what I affectionately will call my “People Who Need To Die” series. I’ve been compiling this list of pet peeve personality types since, I dunno, 6 years old, and the list has spiraled out of control to where I lost count. Every now and then I’ll pull a random personality type out of a hat and ask for feedback and insights about it.

Today’s person who needs to die is #378: the conversational hostage-holder known as the phone squatter. I had an experience with one of these people today. This is the type of person who, once he or she has you on the phone, will do whatever it takes to keep you on as if their very life depends on it. Lulls do not deter them. Yawns, hints, overt statements…all are just challenges to be trampled over or sidestepped entirely.

Phone squatter comes in many varieties. For example there’s the gorilla squatter. This one strongarms you into staying. He pushes past all objections and just keeps talking. You try to signal that you are signing off and he’ll just cut you off and ignore you. Sometimes if you manage to actually vocalize that you want to get off, he will go ultra-direct and actually call you out on it, like so:

You: “All right, well it was nice talking to you.”

Gorilla Squatter: “You gettin’ off?”

You: “Yeah, I have a bunch of things to do…”

Gorilla Squatter: “Like what?”

You: “Uh…like, I have to…”

Gorilla Squatter: “Yeah right, nigga, you just want to get off the phone. You don’t have to lie to me. I know how that goes.”

You: “No that’s not it, I really have a lot of stuff to do.”

Gorilla: “Yeah, right. You just trying to get off. I see how you do, son.” [NOTE THE CONFRONTATIONAL APPROACH COMBINED WITH THE REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY]

This is where the gorilla squatter gets you, because he has strongarmed you into a corner, then tricked you into justifying and explaining yourself for doing what is your God-given right, which is to get off your own damn phone! Now you are not only on the defensive, but you’re practically apologizing and have a vague guilt over being called out.

You: “Hey, it’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, it’s…”

Gorilla: “No, you don’t. It’s cool, I can take a hint.”

You: “NO! I do want to talk to you!

Gorilla: “All right then, fine, let me finish telling you about what Rayray and them did….”

The gorilla squatter uses a mix of intimidation and reverse psychology to get you every time. The key is to never waver or get caught in the trap of justifying yourself for trying to get off, or like a shark sniffing blood in the water, he’ll pounce on you and rip you to shreds. He can smell weakness and doubt from the other end of that receiver. He’s a pro.

The other type of phone squatter is the Sneaky Squatter. This is the guy that doesn’t confront you or guilt you out like Gorilla. His tactic is to act like he’s agreeing with you. He puts up no overt resistance. He acts like he’s trying to get off the phone too. But somehow or other, he sneakily hooks you into another strand of conversation, while making it look perfectly innocent and natural. You’ve tried to sign off about 20 times and each time he agrees, yet next thing you know a knew conversation topic somehow started. His key weapons are evasion, deflection and rapid fire, naturalistic segues. After realizing you’ve been duped into continuing the conversation, you try to get off again a few minutes later only to get tricked again. After trying to get off several times and getting duped each time, you find yourself feeling guilty for constantly trying to get off even though you’ve done nothing wrong, or you get so fed up you blow up at this character, and then feel bad over that. Rather than describe it further, let’s just click the icon below and listen to an example (warning, salty ass language ahead):

The last type of phone squatter is the Storyteller Squatter. This type of squatter is an attention whore that loves to get people to listen to his problems, real or imagined. It’s never “Hi, how’s the fam, how’s the wife, how’s work, I’m fine, bye.” Instead it’s sort of like free association PCP-induced venting; it’s really vague, the story is nonlinear and goes nowhere, and you never understand what it was about once it’s over. The substance of the story isn’t as important to this cat as the feeling that he’s being listened to and humored. He’s a narcissist to the nth degree. This dude doesn’t even care if you get a word in edgewise, and may even cut you off and talk over you, even when all you’re doing is agreeing with him. For example Storyteller starts off by telling you about some major problem, like he’s mad at his coworkers and he thinks he’s going to lose his job. That’s the major hook, right? Once he unloads something heavy like that on you, you can’t just get off the phone without looking like a major insensitive dickhead, right? Now that he knows he’s got you captive, he’s free to go off and regale you with tangents about his baby mama, his money problems, his dating issues, why he can’t get his car fixed, how his parents pissed him off, the circus, all the while claiming that it relates to his original point (which he’s probably forgotten by this point anyway). This dude’s preferred method is layering and complexity. He just adds layers and layers to the story until you can’t even follow it anymore. By the time the circus midgets and the bulimic strippers enter the story you’re too heavily invested to bail out now, he’s no closer to explaining his original problem and he’s guaranteed that there’s no easy way to wrap the story up at this point. If you say, “Let’s just finish it tomorrow,” he’s just say “No prob, I’m almost done, let me just tell you the very last part.” Then he’ll introduce a whole new tangent and cast of characters. When (if) he finishes his story, DON’T remind him that he never actually returned to the original point of the story (in this example, it was the tension with the coworkers and his fear of getting fired) because he’ll just say “Oh yeah, you’re right!” and start all over again. (I fell into this trap before)

Does anyone know people like this? What motivates them? Is it loneliness? Idleness? Insanity? Did they receive too much attention growing up? Not enough? I’m the type of guy that hates long phone conversations because I imagine a million more productive things I could be doing instead. But the phone squatter seems like if left to his own devices, he would never sign off of a conversation on his own. Are they oblivious to the fact that people want to get off? Or do they realize it but are just so shameless that they don’t care?

The worst situation with these guys is when they actually have some piece of information you need. This happened to me recently. I started doing the balancing game: “Is what I need from them important enough to risk being held hostage on your phone? And if it is important enough, then you have to phone and having to do battle to get off?” I decided it was, so I dialed the dreaded number. 1 ring (hm)…..2 rings (looking good)….3 rings (come on, one more to go)….4 rings (I can see the promised land!)…VOICEMAIL!!!! YES!! Left him a message telling what I needed. Hallelujah!

He calls back later, I screen the call with Caller ID (first line of defense against the squatter), voicemail symbol comes on and I check the voicemail to get my information.:”Yo T…Got what you need….call me.” Motherfucker. This is not an accident or a harmless character quirk.

The squatter is a social sadist.

In Part 1, we focused on how human nature is driven by two primary drives, the drive of self-preservation and the drive to spread our genes through reproduction. In this part, we’ll focus on the role one particular aspect of our human nature, the tendency to stereotype, satisfies those two drives.

First things first, let’s be honest about one thing: we all stereotype. For example, say you were running late to attend an opera and you get lost. You see two groups of people walking by. Who would you rather stop to ask for directions to the opera hall?

This one?

Or this one?

Now what if you were asking for directions to a indie rock venue instead? Would your answer change then?

One benefit stereotyping has is to simplify our lives by helping us make split-second choices. It’s a mental shorthand for making decisions. This was especially important for our ancestors, given the dangerous conditions they lived in. Picture the time you’d waste if every time you were faced with the same specific scenario, you had to take the time to reevaluate that scenario from scratch, and how much more danger you would be in as a result.

For example, one of our ancestors faces a sabretooth tiger. The tiger attacks it, and our ancestor barely gets away with his life. Later on, he faces a different sabretooth tiger. A certain part of him is going to be wary of that tiger based on his experience with the previous tiger. He has stereotyped sabretooth tigers as bloodthirsty maneaters. This wariness will change all his future interactions with sabretooth tigers, thereby increasing his chances of surviving and living to reproduce and spread genes.

Now picture other members in the community who don’t have this tendency to stereotype. These dumbasses, no matter how many sabretooth tigers they encounter, are going to stop and wonder each time “I wonder if this fuzzy guy wants to eat me. Let me find out.” They never change their future behavior toward a tiger on account of their previous encounters with tigers. Instead of using the initial moments of encounter to run away or kill the tiger, they waste precious time making a brand new, independent assessment, giving the tiger more time to pounce on them.

It’s important at this time to discuss an evolutionary concept known as the least costly mistake. The least costly mistake says that when an organism is faced with a choice that requires risk assessment, the organism that risks the least costly mistake is more likely to be the one who survives to pass on his or her genes. Although the least costly mistake varies greatly from situation, the most costly mistake is remarkably consistent: it’s almost always death or loss of opportunity to pass on genes.

To illustrate the least costly mistake concept with stereotyping, let’s revisit the sabretooth tiger example. If the man does stereotype the tiger as a vicious killer when it turns out it’s a nice, friendly animal, what is the costliest consequence of this mistake? He’s missed out on a possible new pet maybe? He misses out on the chance to bond and play for a while with a fuzzy animal? Now if a man doesn’t stereotype a tiger as a vicious killer and it turns out it really is a horrific maneater, what is the costliest consequence of this mistake? Serious injury or death.

So which is the least costly mistake for our ancestors? Stereotyping or not stereotyping? And since natural and sexual selection tends to favor the organisms that consistently choose the least costly mistake, who has the better advantage, the organism that stereotypes or the organism that doesn’t? The ones who do stereotype obviously. And these people are going too pass along the same stereotyping tendencies to their children, while the people who don’t stereotype won’t be passing their aversion to snap judgments onto their children…because they won’t survive to reproduce. They’ll get weeded out of the gene pool.

Now most people would find no fault in stereotyping tigers. Everyone except the nuttiest PETA activist would admit that most tigers are out to get us. Stereotyping becomes more controversial in our modern society when applying stereotypes to groups that are not by and large out to get you. As shown by the fact that affirmative action continues to thrive and a black man is leading the charge for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, most whites are not as racist as some would like you to believe. And even though blacks and hispanics have higher crime rates per capita than other races in America, a vast majority of blacks and hispanics aren’t criminals. So unlike the tiger scenario, stereotyping most whites as racist or most blacks and latinos as criminals makes no sense, right? Well, it isn’t that easy.

The problem is that humans don’t weigh good events equally with bad events. As shown in The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold by Robert Levine:

[P]eople experience more pain from a loss than they do pleasure from an equal gain. We get more upset over losing $100 than we feel happy about gaining $100. This is true not only for money but for our lives in general. It’s been shown, for example, that bad emotions feel bad more than good emotions feel good: people try harder to escape bad moods than they do to prolong good mood and they remember their bad moods longer than their good ones…As one of my clinical psychology colleagues estimated it, the average person needs five good experiences to balance out a single bad one.

From an evolutionary viewpoint, a bias toward the negative makes perfect sense. Once again it comes down the survival of our species has always been more closely linked to avoiding disaster than to finding happiness. We’re primed to see threats. People pick an angry face out of a happy crowd much more quickly than they pick a happy face out of an angry crowd. Potential danger signals action needs to be taken. The only action positive events usually call for is celebration, and nobody’s ever died from forgetting to plan a party.

Focusing on the negative over the positive is another example of the least costly mistake principle. Misjudging a bad person as friendly is a more costly mistake than misjudging a good person as evil. The latter mistake will just lead to maybe hurt feelings and the loss of a potential friendship. You can possibly recover from that, and if not, fuck it, life goes on. The former mistake however can lead to serious injury and possibly death, from which there’s no recovery.

So if you’re black in the deep south in the 60s, and lynchings are a real possibility, avoiding death is a much bigger concern to you than taking the time to think of all the good white people you might be misjudging as racist. You would have had some negative experience with a white person in your life, or you would at least had had friends and family with bad experiences, and this would cause you to view all white people, fairly or unfairly, with suspicion. You waste time wondering if that white mob coming at you at night are out to lynch or out for a nighttime walk and you can end up lynched.

In his book, Larry Elder describes some disturbing trends in black crime in his book The Ten Things You Can’t Say In America. Although a majority of blacks and latinos are not criminals, they have proportionately higher rates of criminality against whites:

“Twenty-five percent of young black men are in jail, on parole, or on probation. A black man is ten times more likely to rape a white woman than a white man is to rape a black woman. Blacks account for 50 percent of the nation’s prisoners [despite only being 13% of the population]. Gang-bangers are almost inevitably black or Latino. Hurts the image, you know. Don’t think the young white woman in that elevator is oblivious. Don’t think that a white woman living in the city hasn’t seen, experienced, or had friends who experienced crime at the hands of black thugs…If Jesse Jackson himself says he’s relieved when the late-night footsteps on the street behind him belong to white rather than black feet, all bets are off.”

So it doesn’t matter that a majority of blacks and latinos aren’t criminals, or that a majority of whites aren’t violent racists. So long as the perception is out there that a higher than normal amount of criminality exists in minority communities or a higher than normal amount of racism exists among whites, humans are going to lapse into the hardwired behavior that allowed their ancestors to survive for generations: accentuating the bad, being overly cautious and applying negative sterotypes to protect themselves.

But the best thing that can come out of negative stereotyping is that it’s a symptom that alerts us to greater societal ills. Rather than just demanding that people stop stereotyping, we should instead try to understand the reasons why we’ve evolved with this tendency and try to figure out what the stereotypes are telling us. Stereotypes arise for one of two reasons: because they are true conclusions based on valid premises or they are bad or exaggerated conclusions based on bad exaggerated premises. If the stereotype is true and is negative to boot, we should focus on changing the reality of the situation for the better rather than chastising the stereotyper and forcing him to be politically correct. If the stereotype is false, than we should try to attack the faulty premises at the root of the stereotype rather than just demand the stereotyper “play nice” and be PC. But remember, if your only response to a stereotyper is to point out “Well most blacks/whites/latinos/gays aren’t like that” you’re wasting your time because our minds are programmed to give negative things five times the weight as positive things. You have to create the impression that the negative is outweighed by a vast and substantial positive majority if you want to really deter a stereotype.

Recommended Reading:

• The Power of Persuasion by Levine is so useful and has such a breadth of information that I can’t overstate its value in understanding the human mind enough. Especially when it comes to fallacies in logic and thinking, and how those fallacies get exploited.
• Larry Elder is a black conservative that gets a lot of flack for his conservative viewpoints and politically incorrect views, but he is a very sharp cat that makes very compelling and thought-provoking arguments that are worth reading, even if you ultimately end up disagreeing with him. This book, 10 Things You Can’t Say In America, is one of my all-time favorite books.

I’ll do part 2 of the stereotyping post on Monday. I felt like tackling something else today instead because it was a timelier issue, and by next week the topic will be a little stale.

This blog is fairly new, but I had another blog before so I know a lot of the cliches that come up on a regular basis. One of them is the mandatory New Year’s Resolutions posts that pop up all over the blogosphere on January 1, and this year was no different. I pretty much can’t stand that stuff. I forgive women for making those posts, because symbolic rebirths and brand new personal declarations provide them with some sort of emotional release, and to women experiencing emotions is more addictive than a cocaine and heroin speedball and even therapeutic. I’m cool with that and respect it. But I really don’t like seeing guys overdoing the whole New Year’s resolution thing. It just doesn’t feel right to me. It bothers me almost as much as meeting a man who hates Fight Club, which of course means I can’t befriend them. (This is not a joke, by the way. I literally do not trust men who hate Fight Club and avoid interacting with them at all costs if possible.)

As VK said:

The next time I post will be in 08 when I?m done with a little side project. Just do me a favor and DONT post your gay new years resolutions. Seriously nobody but God and your grandmother care and I even doubt God gives a shit. Especially if your going to ?stop smoking? or ?start exercising more?. You really waited to a calendar date to do something that can improve and lengthen your life?

Or as Roissy put it:

Fuck resolutions. They are for people who couldn?t get their shit together the previous 365 days.

Pithy, but on point.

The main problem I have with New Year’s resolutions is that since it’s tied into a specific day to start, and it’s only considered a success if you can keep it up all year long, the moment you fall off the wagon, you’ve blown it for that year and just give up until next January 1.  If a bad habit can be started on any day of the year, the same rule should apply to good habits.

But if you are serious about changing something about yourself, whether or not it’s in the form of a New Year’s resolution or not, I want to give you a piece of advice. Don’t attack it as a whole laundry list of specific problems that need solving.   Because once you do that, you end up with a huge daunting list of things to tackle at once and you end up getting intimidated by enormity of the task, which just makes it easier to fall off the wagon.

I don’t care how many problems you think you have, you actually only have two at most: vision and/or discipline. That’s it. Every problem you have is just a symptom of your lack of those two things.

Can’t stop smoking? A symptom that you lack discipline. Alcoholic? Symptom that you lack discipline. Studying hard but can’t get good grades? You lack vision and need to work smarter instead of harder. Bad credit? Possibly a lack of vision and discipline. Take dating for example. Do you approach the opposite sex with ease, date people often but still can’t find a mate? Then you have the discipline to put yourself out there, but it’s your vision that sucks. You need to grow some better game. Or maybe you have decent social skills but don’t put yourself out there enough socially? Then your vision is fine, but your discipline needs work. I repeat, what you have is not a bunch of problems that you need fixing, what you have is a bunch of symptoms of one or two larger problems called vision and discipline.

You can look at all types of people and group them into four categories: people with both vision and discipline, people with vision but no discipline, people with discipline but no vision and people with neither vision nor discipline. In sports, Michael Jordan had both. The baseball book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game has plenty of examples of athletes with only one or the other. Billy Beane for example was an incredible natural talent, but he didn’t have the correct discipline and never was able to become the best player he could be. Lenny Dykstra, his teammate, had nowhere near the same amount of natural talent as Billy, but he had an incredible discipline and desire to be nothing else on earth but a baseball player. He wouldn’t even read for leisure for fear of damaging his eyes for baseball. Phil Jackson is another example of someone who as an athlete was considered more of a hard worker (discipline) than a natural talent (vision).

Now sometimes someone can have such a surplus of one trait that it makes the deficit in the other trait hard to notice. Some students are so naturally bright that they can score high grades without having to study hard. They have lousy discipline but it flies underneath the radar and goes unnoticed because he’s still getting the results. Their vision compensates for their lack of discipline.

Another example is in the gym. I see some guys with horrible form, no rhyme or reason to their workout, no set exercises or routines to follow, totally playing it by ear, yet they’ll have great bodies. And the reason is that despite their lack of vision, they have incredible discipline when it comes to working out. They are there every day, no matter what the weather, they stay for two hours or more a day and they throw up big weight and do the cardio.  So the inefficiency caused by their lack of vision is compensated for by their work ethic.

The only danger with these guys who get by with only one trait or the other is that when they hit a wall and can’t improve any more with what they’ve been doing thus far, they’re suddenly screwed because they neglected the other trait for so long they have no idea how to develop it now. So that guy who never studied suddenly reaches a level of schooling where natural talent won’t cut it anymore and now he’s screwed because he’s neglected to build up good study habits over the years. And those guys who only use hard work and no planning to exercise reach a point where they can’t get any more gains just from spending hours in the gym, yet they have no idea how to make their workout smarter either.

So if you have a ton of shortcomings that need fixing, realize that the real problem is either vision, discipline or both, and work on how to improve them. Usually when we have bad discipline in one area, we have it across the board in many areas. The same goes for bad vision. People who have made bad choices in the past tend to continue to make bad choices in the future and in all types of situations. Some people say lack of vision and/or discipline and not injustice and capitalist exploitation is the real reason why the poor stay poor and the rich get richer. You might hate to hear that, but consider this: why do so many lottery winners go broke and often end up in even worse financial straits than before? Because they went from bad vision and/or discipline with no money to bad vision and/or discipline with a millionaire’s bank account.

My point is don’t just make a list of a bunch stuff you don’t like about yourself and think the job is done. Try to figure out what the list is telling you about yourself. Is your discipline bad, is your vision bad, or is it both? Then just attack those two things. Once you get those two things down, everything else will fall into place. And remember, you don’t have to wait until January 1 to start.

Recommended Reading:

• Moneyball and The Blind Side by Michael Lewis are true stories about athletes, in baseball and football respectively, and both books, especially Moneyball, give great examples of the role vision and discipline play in helping an athlete reach his full potential.
• Fight Club movie and book: Self-explanatory, masterpiece, needs no introduction. Not really that important to this article, but fuck it, everyone should read and watch it.

When I say that the tendency to stereotype isn’t all bad, and in fact is often a good thing, I get a lot of grief. The first thing people think is that I’m somehow anti-minority or pro-white, but everyone from a straight WASP male to a Wiccan black butch lesbian can be a victim of stereotypes. Stereotypes are not a problem exclusive to minorities, nor are minorities exempt from doing the stereotyping as well.

Like it or not, the tendency to stereotype is a part of human nature, and my view is that if a behavior or biological response is part of our human nature, it must be because it traditionally gave people an evolutionary advantage at some point in human history. When we say that a trait gave us an evolutionary advantage, what we’re saying is that it satisfied our two fundamental biological drives: the drive for self-preservation and the drive to spread genes through reproduction.

Take gossip for example. On the surface it may seem like a petty and ugly part of our human nature with little to no redeeming qualities. But there are many plausible theories out there that convincingly suggest the opposite, that the tendency to gossip is a tool that gives humans a huge evolutionary advantage over those who never gossip. Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language discusses the development of language and the evolutionary benefits of gossip, for example. According to Dunbar, in the days before credit reports and background checks, gossip traditionally benefited communities by spreading the word about dangerous and untrustworthy people. If you were unreliable, a thief or violent, word spread around about you and people avoided you. In this way gossip satisfied the self-preservation drive. Also, say a woman was a slut. As a man looking to carry your genes into the next generation, you would have avoided marrying a slut at all costs because in the days before DNA tests and reliable birth control, a slut can easily get pregnant by another man and tell you the baby is yours. Now you’re paying for another man’s child and not spreading your genes. So by telling you about someone’s sexual behavior, gossip helped a man with his drive to reproduce.  Those who didn’t engage in spreading or hearing gossip probably had their genes weeded out out of existence eventually.

It’s also human nature for people to be more critical of a woman for being promiscuous and unfaithful than for a man. As I explained in this earlier post, that’s because if a man slept around and impregnated several women, it optimized the drive to reproduce in two ways. First, one man sleeping with multiple women led to multiple pregnancies whereas one woman sleeping with multiple men still only led to one pregnancy. That’s an inefficient allocation of resources. Second, if one man slept with multiple women, you’d know who the father is and who the mother is in each pregnancy. If a woman slept with multiple men, especially in the days before DNA testing and reliable birth control, you wouldn’t know which man was the father. This is an obstacle in a man’s drive to reproduce and spread genes. It’s for these reasons (and others) that we still tend to be more critical of women for promiscuity than men.

For a man, on the other hand, it’s a worse blow to his reputation to not be a provider than it is to be promiscuous. That’s why most negative gossip about men revolves around being cheap, being a deadbeat dad, and being chronically unemployed or lazy. Traditionally, the danger to women when men slept around wasn’t a threat to the drive to reproduce and spread genes. As we’ve seen, men sleeping around actually optimizes that goal. The threat to a woman when men slept around was to the other drive, the drive for self-preservation, because that man may choose to take better care of the other women and her children and send a majority of his resources their way instead. In evolutionary terms, a hardworking and responsible polygamous man who takes care of all his women and children is preferable to a lazy and irresponsible monogamous man who doesn’t take care of his one family. So when you look at human nature in evolutionary terms and focus on the two drives, the natural tendency human beings have to gossip about women’s sluttiness and men’s ambition and finances make perfect sense.

It also works in reverse, if good gossip is spread about you, it increases your reputation which in turn increases your chances of survival and reproduction. This gives people an incentive to manage their reputations, follow the rules and conform to societal norms, hence another benefit gossip provides to a community.

Take something even less obvious, like the natural urge we have to tickle people, and the built-in response we have of laughing when being tickled. It may seem like a stretch, but even tickling satisfies the two drives, as seen in this NY Times article:

Tickling and laughter are universal among humans and can even be found among chimpanzees, suggesting that they serve some serious evolutionary purpose. Researchers agree that tickling plays an important role in the bonding of infants and parents. Mother tickles baby. Baby laughs and smiles. Mother laughs and smiles. They endear themselves to each other to their mutual evolutionary advantage.

But Dr. Glenn Weisfeld, a human ethologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, suggests that tickling may do much more. Tickling, he maintains, is an educational activity.

”The structures of the body that are most vulnerable to tickling are also the ones that are most vulnerable to attack,” Dr. Weisfeld said. ”We may be responsive to tickling because it gives us practice in defending ourselves.” Children laugh, he said, to encourage adults to continue this tickle schooling, in what are typically safe, practice play attacks.

These examples reinforce the view that human nature is a collection of instinctive responses and learned behaviors that give us an evolutionary advantage by helping us either survive or reproduce. Gossip helps people avoid dangerous, unreliable and untrustworthy people. By helping us socially fit in and form bonds, laughing can help us in our drives to reproduce and spread genes. By teaching us to protect vital areas, tickling can help us with self-preservation.  And the list goes on and on.

So if stereotyping is a part of human nature, what evolutionary advantages does it give us? And how does it satisfy the two primal drives of self-preservation and spreading genes through reproduction? We’ll get into that in part 2.

Recommended Reading:

• I first encountered the two human drives in reading a book by the pickup artist Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed. Pickup artists and their books often get a bad rap as being manipulative or just plain bunk, but I find them to have a lot of sound theories about evolutionary psychology in general and gender relations in particular. Mystery was the subject of the recent VH-1 show The Pickup Artist. I find his social theories to be pretty sound overall.
• This book is a great resource on the evolution and advantage of language in general and gossip in particular.
• This book is an excellent starting point for learning about evolutionary psychology, and I highly recommend it. It’s written in a really easy-breezy style and is extremely readable and layperson friendly.

Click here for Part 2 of this post.