Our "Life is a Lottery" Culture

One of the things President Obama is famous for is dissing the successful as "life's lottery winners." This parallels his charge that successful businesses don't deserve the credit for their success, saying "You didn't build that." This is politically shrewd, because it taps into two basic weaknesses of human nature: envy and greed. His philosophy, and that of many liberals in generals, conveys the message that voters are justified in their envy of success and wealth. Voters are encouraged to demand income redistribution because the wealth of others was not earned.

Fairness doctrine dominates the ethos of liberals and lies at the heart of their increasingly successful efforts to punish success by government regulation and taxation policy. If success is due to circumstance and luck, then it is only fair to push for more equal outcomes in the efforts of people to succeed. Voters, perhaps now a majority of them, like the idea of leveling the playing field by taking from the successful and giving to those who have not succeeded.

At the other end of the spectrum, the lottery mentality offers an excuse for those whose lives are mostly marked by failures. Their problem is bad luck, or exploitation by the successful. This is another example of unfairness, perhaps even of the mendacity of those who have won life's lottery. No longer do we have to blame failure on bad choices and decisions or on laziness. Poverty or antisocial behavior can't be blamed on freely chosen actions. Those who fail can find scapegoats and blame them.

Politically, liberal politicians have found the guarantee of success: convince people they are victims and pledge to punish the perpetrators and restore fairness. As Jeff Bergner put it in his essay, "One cannot build a cult of victimhood on the soil of personal responsibility."

It is not just craven politicians who reject personal responsibility. Many brain scientists have arrived at the same conclusion from highly flawed experiments that seem to show that a person makes choices and decisions well before their claim of when they made them. This research has been interpreted to mean that the unconscious mind makes the decision and later that becomes known consciously. Thus, the decision cannot be made freely. It is driven unconsciously by our genes and past learning experiences.

Thus, scientists provide support for redistributionist and retributionist social policies, because life success is not based on merit. We now have defense lawyers arguing "diminished capacity" for criminal clients. We even have clerics who argue from original sin and predestination perspectives that we can't help our bad morals.

I am writing a book on "Making a Scientific Case for Free Will." So far, despite my track record of science-publishing success, no publisher will touch it. Has free will become politically incorrect?

So why try? If you succeed, you won't get credit. You will get diminished, perhaps even punished. If you fail, you won't get blame. In fact, you will get compensated. This is what life in America is coming to in this new age of "life's lottery."

Sources:

Source for quote: Bergner, Jeff. 2015. The fame of life. The Weekly Standard, June 29, p. 25-26.

Source for critique of free-will research: Klemm, W. R. 2010. Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 6: (6) 47-65.

Where We Place Blame Depends on What Is True

When we do something that others say is wrong, do we blame ourselves and repent? That depends on whether we agree it was wrong. In other words, the issue becomes one of what is a fact or true. Was what we did really wrong, or just some busybody's opinion?

Honoring truth is a value. People are taught values, and how and what they are taught is especially impactful on children. Both children and adults are prone to fuzzy thinking in general, but this becomes especially problematic when it comes to thinking about the pursuit of honorable behavior. In a New York Times piece by Justin McBrayer, a college philosophy professor, explains how fuzzy thinking about morals is leading children to think there are no moral facts, just moral opinions which they are free to accept or reject without blame. He is noticing that this moral ambiguity seems to be increasing among college students. He also observed that the issue was captured in a sign in his kid's secondary school, which posted the edict that defined fact and opinion as follows:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

When McBrayer Googled definitions on the web, he found them all to be similar to the sign in the school. The implications of such definitions are quite damaging for honorable behavior. It breeds a situational ethics mentality that says that opinions are not based on fact or truth, and thus opinions are fungible. Such definitions mean that there are no moral truths, because none of them can be proved to be true. Moral claims are believed to be mere opinions. For example, murder is therefore not immoral, just illegal, because a majority of people had an opinion it was wrong and passed a law outlawing it. No one person's opinions are any more valid than anybody else's. These definitions lead to a moral ambiguity that is systematically encouraged by Common Core standards which include the deceptively innocuous requirement that children learn to "distinguish fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text." Links to the flawed definitions occur in lesson plans and quizzes.

The reality is that we think opinions are wrong if we do not hold them. Often, our attachment to our own opinions is welded by self-interest and emotions rather than by reason and evidence. What reason and evidence we employ is used as argument for existing opinion rather than for evaluation of alternative opinions. But if one uses reason and evidence to examine a range of opinions, the opinion we finally accept as true is more likely to be true. We construct an excuse for ourselves from thinking hard to seek absolute truth if we accept the claim that no moral truths are absolutely truer than others. How convenient. Now we don't have to take blame for what otherwise would be moral failures. This could have been the rationale for the statements of Jesus, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," and the paraphrase of several statements that are equivalent to "Seek ye the truth and you shall find it." 

The pedagogical challenge is for schools to place more emphasis on evidence-based thinking. Too many teachers impose their own opinions as authoritative and true without compelling supporting evidence. This conveys the message that it is o.k. for students to do likewise with their own opinions. Science courses have special value because they require students to consider and value evidence for conclusions about the nature of the physical world. That is the mindset students should use for conclusions outside the realm of science.

The problem is not just limited to uneducated kids. McBrayer sees moral relativism all the time with colleagues in academia. Just what is the problem with these definitions and mind set? For one, truth does not have to have proof in order to be true. Some things can be true, even though proof is not yet available. For example, the theory of evolution has overwhelming supporting evidence, but many people have the opinion it is not true because it cannot be definitively proved. McBrayer points out that some things that have been "proved" turn out later to be wrong. Proof is a feature of our mental life, and if proof is required for facts, then facts become person relative. You can have your truth, I can have mine. How then do we refute the counter-argument that says "You are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts."

The second flaw in the definitions is that students are being taught that claims are either facts or opinions: they can't be both. Common Core quizzes for example require students to sort claims into one or the other category. There are demonstrable facts that certain people steadfastly refuse to believe, as well as beliefs about certain "truths" that are manifestly not based on evidence or fact. The main point, however, is the reality that a fact can be true and believed at the same time.

Unfortunately in school curricula, students are taught that value claims are opinions, neither true nor based on fact. In an online fact vs. opinion student worksheet, McBrayer found that children were expected to classify the following behaviors as mere opinions:

• Copying homework assignments is wrong.
• Cursing in school is inappropriate.
• All men are created equal.
• It is wrong for people under age 21 to drink alcohol.
• Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.
• Drug dealers belong in prison.

Our culture may be producing a whole generation that thinks there are no moral facts and thus no world view about honor can be true. Thus, no one can be blamed for violating moral values. We are left with the unavoidable problem, however, that adult life presents us with moral dilemmas wherein we must acknowledge certain moral values as facts. How, for example, can we be outraged when rioters destroy the property of innocents if this is not viewed as a moral fault, as dishonorable behavior? Or with McBrayer's example, how can we be outraged at the murder of cartoonists, if such murder is morally neutral? Indeed, we can rationalize it as o.k., because the cartoonist was extremely offensive. To protect people from crimes against humanity, we must acknowledge the reality that certain moral truths are indeed facts. As a society, we are challenged to think through the evidence that supports each of many competing moral claims to determine which claims are true. We abdicate that responsibility by believing that nothing is true that has not been proved. Unfortunately, it is easier to abdicate moral commitments than to live an honorable life.

Even when we acknowledge that certain things are right and others wrong, we seem to be living in a devolving culture where blame is something you place on others or on uncontrollable outside forces. How long will it be until blame is no longer politically correct, where we can't hold anybody responsible for anything? Maybe that time is coming soon, as witnessed by the numerous recent scandals and failures in government agencies where nobody is held accountable.

There is much more to be said about honesty, and I am working on a book about truth and falsity. In the meanwhile, I recommend the book by Dan Ariely, "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty."

For more about Dr. Klemm's writings, see his web site at http://wrklemm.com and his blog on Improve Learning and Memory at http://thankyoubrain.blogspot.com.

Source:

McBrayer, Justin P. (2015). Why our children don't think there are moral facts. New York Times. March 1. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/?_r=0. Accessed June 25, 2015.

Blaming the Victim

"What did we do to make them hate us so much?' America and Western civilization in general are under attack by Islamic terrorists. Apologists assert that we brought this wrath upon ourselves by our historical sins (like the Crusades) and therefore we must not only apologize but also make excuses for terrorism and take blame for their dysfunctional governments (created by colonialism) and their poverty. So what if our people get berated, bombed, and beheaded. We had it coming.

Yet such self-hatred fails to recognize that the Crusades were conducted to take back the Western countries and Christian holy sites that Muslims had conquered. Colonialism was a problem, but America had no colonies in Middle East or African colonialism. Dysfunctional governments seem to be the rule in Muslim countries, but we don't make the rules there. Muslims do.

Moreover, how do sins of the past equate to sins of the present? The Christian church has gone through many epochs of reform. Radical Islam does not seek to reform itself. It harkens back to Islam's original and literal scripture in the seventh century.

***

"So what that we don't have immigration papers? Our country is poor, yours is rich, and we have a right to violate your laws because you stole our country and made it poor." Norte Americanos are blamed for banana republics and the historical government dysfunction in Latin American. Today, open-border activists argue that the U.S. deserves the chaos of illegal immigration because of our misbegotten riches, historically stolen from Latin American countries who now have a right to seize our entitlements and jobs from our own poor.

Only Mexicans can claim we took part of their country, but it wasn't originally their country. It had belonged to Spain before Mexico rebelled against Spanish rule. Texas in 1836 was a province of Mexico, and Texans seceded because of mistreatment and restricted political rights by the Mexican government. Mexico refused to grant Texans their freedom and independence, apparently unwilling to honor the wish of Texans to do the same thing that Mexico had done to Spain little more than a decade earlier. California, Arizona, and New Mexico territory were purchased in 1848 from Mexico with cash and forgiveness of debt owed to Americans.

It is not clear what natural resources we stole from Central and South America. On the contrary, we created NAFTA trade agreements that help their economies. We transferred to Venezuela and Mexico the oil technologies that help to prop up their economies. And the countries that are complaining about our not taking their emigrants have much stricter immigration restrictions than we do. Talk about hypocrisy!

***

"Your ancestors were racists and held slaves. Therefore, we are entitled to affirmative action, reverse discrimination, and even reparations." The ancestors of most whiteys in America weren't even here when slavery existed. They were in Europe and Asia and came after the civil war. And among those who were here, 359,528 Union soldiers died to free the slaves. Where is the condemnation of the blacks in Africa who captured fellow blacks and ran the slave trade? American blacks are free to return to Africa — interesting that they don't want to. Around the world, blacks want to come to America, not leave it.

***

These and other examples of blaming the victim that could be cited are political or religious. i these areas, rational and unemotional discussion is usually futile. So let us consider other examples.

Defense lawyers in general often use "blame the victim" tactics when they know their defendant is guilty. Soft-hearted juries are swayed by clever excuses and specious argument. I bet they teach this stuff in law school.

Among the many examples of blaming the victim are rape victims whose assailants charge were dressed provocatively and thus were "asking for it."  The excuse is that what a woman wears, says, where she goes, or what she does can make her responsible for the crime committed against her. No amount of saying no or physical resistance seems to nullify the excuses. Lawyers try to gain sympathy for rapists by pointing out how unfair it is to tempt men. Indeed, this idea is probably the basis for the Muslim requirements that their women cover their whole body and even their face when in public.

A related example is domestic violence, typically inflicted by males on their spouses or girlfriends. The victim is blamed for enabling the violence by refusing to end the relationship. While resistance to leave can sometimes develop because the woman is emotionally weak and dependent, often they have little choice for economic reasons or often justifiable fear for themselves or children if they dare to leave. A common explanation for why women do not leave their battering relationship is Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness." The teaching of helplessness comes from their abuser. In some locales, the victim faces a high tolerance of wife beating by police and legal systems.

Chronic victims may be inviting perpetuation of their abuse when they believe they are victims of outside forces beyond their control. When helplessness has been learned, it is hard to generate the will and initiative to use internal psychological resources to overcome the abuse.  Chronic victims commonly have low sense of self-worth, low sense of efficacy, feelings of shame and guilt, and may even believe that they deserve to be punished. The task of recovery from victimization is to take responsibility, moving from helplessness to accountability and from hopelessness to optimism. Seligman makes the point that optimism can be learned too.

Then there is the death fatwa on Salman Rushdie, whom former President Jimmy Carter says invited the attempts on his life by writing a "blasphemous" book. Freedom of speech, according to Carter, seems to apply only for speech that does not offend. He does not elaborate on where one draws the line where murder is warranted for verbal offense. Maybe it just applies to religious challenges.

Bullying is often blamed on the person being bullied for all manner of reasons, such as being gay, ugly, fat, too smart, in the wrong minority group, some negative or annoying personality trait, being weak or too sensitive, and so on. How does the bully justify his own negative traits? Well, of course, that question never arises because bullies pretend to feel superior and are condescending.

Whistleblowers and investigative reporters are often blamed and disparaged when they disclose embarrassing or criminal actions of others. Their colleagues often shun them. Perhaps shunners feel inferior and shamed by their own lack of courage to do the right thing. If those of us on the sidelines don't speak up for the true victims, maybe nobody will. Those who victimize others need to be held responsible, not excused.

Why do people blame the victim? One reason is that people want to believe that life is fair (it is not), and therefore unfairness is hard to accept as a cause of victimization. The victim must deserve her state. Another reason is that making excuses for others provides a rationale for excusing ourselves. If we can lift the burden of personal responsibility on others, we can justify doing it for ourselves. Thus, we don't have to face our own weaknesses. Excuse-making is profound cowardice.

Dr. Klemm's latest books are:

Mental Biology, The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate and

Improve Your Memory For a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine

Sources:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Blaming_the_victim

http://bullying.about.com/od/Victims/fl/6-Examples-of-Victim-Blaming.htm

http://www.zurinstitute.com/victimhood.html#dont

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Guadalupe_Hidalgo

Gene Research Shows the Truth of Proverbs 23:7

“Don’t blame me. I got my meanness from your side of the family.” …
“I got my stubbornness from Uncle Joe.” … 
“I can’t help it; that’s just the way I am.”

Blaming your genes can make a handy excuse. It is also highly misleading. A decade-long international research collaboration involving 442 scientists in 32 worldwide institutions now makes obsolete the original scientific views about DNA and genes. This research initiative, called ENCODE, was initiated and largely funded by the Genome Research Institute of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Just this week, some 30 groundbreaking publications have appeared in premier journals such as Nature and Science.

This accumulated mountain of data unequivocally demonstrates that most of our genes do not code for RNA that translates into proteins used by the body. True, the ENCODE project confirmed that there are about 21,000 traditional protein-coding genes, but they constitute only about 3% of the human genome. Until now, all the other DNA was thought to be “junk DNA,” presumably left over from ancient ancestors with no function in today’s evolved species.

ENCODE scientists have discovered that about 80% of the human genome does have function, but that DNA transcribes RNA as end  products that regulate the expression of protein-coding genes. When a protein-coding gene is expressed, its double helix strands of DNA become unzipped to expose the coding nucleotides so they can translate the code into the RNA that will then translate the code into the various proteins used by the body. Most of the DNA previously thought to be “junk” has now been revealed to regulate gene expression by way of enhancing or suppressing gene expression or shielding protein-coding DNA.

Over 18,000 species of regulatory RNA have been described. Clusters of regulatory genes are found throughout the chromosomes, and they very often regulate non-adjacent genes, often working with other regulatory genes as a team.

These new findings cause some scientists to assert a need to redefine what a gene is. The basic unit of heredity, they say, is not DNA, but rather its RNA transcripts. Why is this new view important? Production of regulatory RNA is governed by the environment, not your biological inheritance. These “epigenetic” influences include things like what you eat, your bodily activities, what you think, and the feedback from how you behave. For example, a muscle body builder, through intense exercise, causes expression of genes to make extraordinary muscle mass. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger before, during, and after his body building career. He had the same protein coding genes all along, but their expression changed by what he chose to do.

What this says is that you can control the expression of your genes by the choices you make and by what you think and do. Most of us are born with a genome that can generate a happy and productive life. Whether that happens or not depends on how our choices and actions affect gene expression.

So, next time you are tempted to blame your genes for a bad outcome, consider what role you played in the expression of those genes. Science is showing the truth of Proverbs  (chapter 23 verse 7),

“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

Source:

Pennizi, Elizabeth (2012). ENCODE project write eulogy for junk DNA. Science. 337: 1159-1161.

Are Humans Just Blameless Robots?

Ever make a really stupid decision? Or said something embarrassing? Or did something you were later ashamed of? I guess maybe we all have. Maybe you even committed a crime.

Not to worry. It’s not your fault, according to a growing body of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. These learned people tell us that humans do not make conscious intentions, decisions, or choices. Those are all made by our robotic unconscious mind, which makes its intentions, decisions, or choices known after the fact to conscious mind.

I wrote an earlier blog on this subject (http://brainblogger.com/2010/10/25/free-will-is-not-an-illusion/), but want to explore it some more because the growing acceptance of blamelessness is having serious consequences in our schools, courts, and in politics.

This idea has actually been around for a long time, apparently 2000 years according to Roskies (2010). But the modern father of the robot view was Ben Libet, who in the 1980s, performed some simple experiments that he and most others interpreted to support the robot view. Basically, he showed that brain signs of a decision to press a button appeared a fraction of a second before the experimental subject said a decision had been made―thus unconscious mind made the decision and later made conscious mind aware of it.

Actually, there are lots of flaws in this experiment and its interpretation, which were pointed out by several scholars in the succeeding years. In 2010, I summarized these objections and added some of my own in a review of the subject. My criticisms focus on three main points: 1) timing of when a free-will event occurs requires introspection, and other research shows that introspective estimates of event timing are not accurate, 2) simple finger movements may be performed without much conscious thought and certainly are not representative of the conscious decisions and choices required in high-speed conversation or situations where the unconscious mind cannot know ahead of time what to do, and 3) the brain activity  measures used were primitive and incomplete. I identified 12 categories of what I regarded as flawed thinking about free will.

Conflicting evidence was available too. Christoph Herrmann and colleagues had reported a study in which subjects were instructed to press one of two buttons, depending on the presented stimulus. They found neural activity preceding the motor response, similar to Libet's experiments. However, this activity was already present prior to stimulus presentation, and thus before participants could decide which button to press. They therefore concluded that this activity does not specifically determine behavior, but more likely reflects a general expectation or preparation for making a choice.

The major flaw in the robot theory is the assumption that conscious choice is a point process that can be quantified in fractions of one second. Yet, real-world willed actions are not instantaneous but often smeared out over long periods of time. In addition, there is overwhelming evidence of a substantial lag between when a conscious decision or choice is made and when it becomes recognized as such.

Soon after my paper, several investigators reported studies that challenged the robot view. For example, Trevena and Miller modified the Libet design to include instructing subjects to occasionally make a decision not to press the button. They saw the same antecedent brain activity irrespective of whether the decision was to move or not to move. Clearly, the antecedent brain activity is not specific to intention to move. The results do not, however, rule out the possibility that unconscious mind makes all decisions (including not to move, in this case),

So, just what does this activity prior to conscious realization represent? No one really knows. In all likelihood, it can reflect the initiation of actions consciously chosen prior to the experiment, or as I put it, consciously following the experimental protocol’s “rules of the game.”  The participants’ reported decision time may just reflect the conscious confirming recognition and re-approval of the initiated action. Sheffield and colleagues (2011) recently showed that neurons can integrate spikes over a period of minutes, slowly reaching a threshold that later produces persistent activity without any additional input.

First of all, I find it interesting that this question is even discussed by any scholars other than philosophers.  This is because free will is not a scientific question. Science requires that an idea or hypothesis has to be framed as falsifiable. Is any theory about free will really falsifiable?  I would argue that this is a metaphysical question and one for which we lack the tools to fully understand.  Like Immanuel Kant, I think we will always be blinded by the spectacles of our own human reason.

Secondly, to hold the robot view, especially on the basis of problematic evidence, is personally and socially unwise, even dangerous. And the problem is that laymen increasingly seem to embrace the position of the scholars. In such areas as education, criminal justice, and politics, personal responsibility is old fashioned, so yesterday.

Take education. Everybody recognizes that schools are in trouble. But nobody holds students and their parents responsible for poor performance. No, the blame is placed on insufficient funding, teachers, school boards, state and local government.

Take criminal justice. It is growing practice among defense attorneys to seize upon any indication of a brain dysfunction to get their client off or have a reduced sentence. Judges and juries often buy the argument. The latest science fad of brain scans has hit the courtrooms. If a scan is different from normal, that must then be reason for the crime. For example, one survey of a few murderers showed that they had abnormal brain scans. That was interpreted to explain the crimes. But nobody raised the possibility that the abnormal brain scan might have been caused by what the murder thought and did over the many years before the crime. This, despite the clearly established fact that what a person experiences, thinks, and does changes the brain structurally and chemically.

Then, there is politics. Democrats are big on “social justice” and particularly encourage people to think of themselves as members of a group that is unfairly treated.  Life is not fair, and if people can be convinced they are victims of one sort or another, politicians get votes by appealing to them as their protector. So the mantra goes like this: blacks and Hispanics are oppressed by Anglo racists, the poor by exploiting rich people, workers by greedy business owners, women by chauvinistic men, gays by homophobic straights, college students by those who set tuition rates. Everybody is encouraged to think of themselves as members of an oppressed group, bitter and envious, and in need of help from liberal politicians to get justice.

It is very comforting to believe that the adversities of life or even your own poor choices are not your fault. If you are not responsible, you get to blame something or somebody else. How convenient.

In terms of how the brain works, unconscious and conscious minds interact and share duties. Unconscious mind governs simple or well-learned tasks, like habits or ingrained prejudices, while conscious mind deals with tasks that are complex or novel, like first learning to ride a bike or play sheet music."

We do often act like robots driven by our unconscious drives when we act out of habit, prejudice, or prior conditioning. But we should and can be responsible for what we make of our brains and for the choices in life we make. In a free-will world, people can choose to extricate themselves from many kinds of misfortune―not to mention make the right choices that can prevent misfortune.

Brain activity causes other brain activity that results in intentions, decisions, choices, and assorted behaviors. Consciousness arises from and is part of brain activity. Therefore, the brain activity of consciousness can cause and modify other brain activity. People are personally responsible because they have a conscious mind with the power to program the brain and its unconscious mind.

Sources:

Herrmann, C. S. et al (2008). Analysis of a choice-reaction task yields a new interpretation of Libet’s experiments. International J. Psychophysiology. 67: 151-157.

Klemm, W. R. (2010). Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 6: (6) 47-65.

Roskies, A. L. (2010). Why Libet’s studies don’t pose a threat to free will. In W. Sinnott-

Armstrong & L. Nadel (Eds.), Conscious will and responsibility (pp. 11-22). New York:

Oxford University Press.

Sheffield, M. E. et al. (2011). Slow integration leads to persistent action potential firing in distal axons of coupled interneurons. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 200-207. doi:10.1038/nn.2728

Trevena, J., and Miller, J. (2010). Brain preparation before a voluntary action: evidence against unconscious movement initiation. Consciousness and Cognition. 19 (1): 447-456.

Political Liberals: Hidden Agendas That Go With Disbelief in Personal Responsibility

The latest mass-murder episode at a Batman movie premier raised once again the argument that people are compelled by bad brains to do bad things. Academics, scientists, philosophers, and political liberals increasingly endorse the view that humans do not have free will―that it is an illusion. The idea is that genes, neurotransmitters, and life experiences make us what we are. They should not be blamed for the bad they do, nor do they deserve credit for the good. So, it is convenient to claim when things go wrong, it is not our fault. Holding that premise requires also to make excuses for others who do wrong or bad things.

Likewise, if you believe there is no free will, you can't take credit for your success. This notion resonates with President Obama’s recent claim that entrepreneurs don’t deserve credit for their business success. He said they could not have done it without the government, citing for example the Internet. Actually, government did not create the Internet, and certainly not Al Gore. The Internet arose from the invention of the TCP protocol by Vinton Cerf, the concept of hyperlinks by Tim Berners-Lee, and the implementation of the Ethernet precursor by Xerox.

Those who want to believe that free will is an illusion turn to science, which in recent years has generated a host of research reports claiming to have provided evidence that all our actions are subconsciously generated and our notions of free will are illusory. I, and others before me, have pointed out flaws in the design and interpretation of this research (Klemm, 2010). Since my critical review, several new reports have presented evidence that also refute the notion of illusory free will. Yet the illusory free-will crowd clings to its unproven position. Why is that?

What I have most recently started to realize is that those who push the idea of illusory free will may have hidden ideological agendas, which even they may not realize. For example, I am struck by how often these zombians, as I like to call them, seem compelled to tell us they are atheists. Why does this matter? On the surface, atheism does not seem to compel a disbelief in free will. But maybe it does. Virtually all religions hold that there is a God who holds humans responsible for their beliefs and moral codes. Thus, it is convenient for those who don’t like the challenge of being held responsible for their actions to reject religion. That gets them off the accountability hook. So, there seems to be some sort of synergistic relationship between disbelief in God and disbelief in free will.

A similar synergism may exist in politics. It may not be an accident that many zombians are intellectually elite and politically liberal. In tune with President Obama, they seem to hold that people don’t deserve their misfortune, nor have they earned their success. It seems that most of the academics, scientists, and philosophers in this elite group also believe that free will does not exist. Thus, any disparities in life status and wealth are inherently unfair, and it is government’s job to expand welfare to the poor and redistribute the wealth of the successful. It harkens back to the old Marxist doctrine that “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”). We should note also that atheism is a cornerstone of Marxist doctrine.

Klemm, W. R. 2010. Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 6: (6) 47-65.

Placing Blame for Family Money Problems

“If you had a better job, we wouldn’t have to live from paycheck to paycheck.”

“If you would stick to the budget, we wouldn’t have so much credit-card debt.”

“The politicians are killing the economy.”

There’s a price to pay for who you blame for family money problems. That price is the relationship. Who or what you blame can produce relationship distress. A recent survey of 632 cohabiting couples (95% were married) revealed that satisfaction with their relationship depended on where they put the burden of responsibility for family money problems during the last few years of the national financial crisis.

In couples where women blamed money problems on their partner’s debts, spending, or income, both they and their partner reported lower relationship satisfaction, unless the women also blamed the national economy. Women were twice as likely to blame their partner than were men. A similar but less marked finding also applied to men. In other words, even when individuals did blame their partner, the negative affect on the relationship was lessened if they also blamed forces outside the relationship.

The study did not emphasize the effect of blaming oneself, perhaps because this was a rare event. As I explain in my book, Blame Game, How to Win It, when things go wrong, most people find it much easier to blame someone else or some environmental situation than to accept responsibility for their own contribution to the problem.

This study was prompted by well-established research of others that had shown that poorly functioning couples tend to blame one another for other kinds of family problems. Couples living in positive relationships protect their positive views of each other by placing the blame outside the relationship.

I have to wonder what the role of blame has been in this modern era of high divorce rates. Are we less likely to take personal responsibility for family problems than we were a couple of generations back when divorce rates were much lower?

Any marriage counselor will tell you that happiness in marriage depends on nurturing, not undermining, the relationship. Blaming a partner for a problem, whether it involves money or something else, leads to maladaptive interpersonal behavior. On the other hand, viewing a partner more charitably, leads to more constructive relationship behaviors.

The national financial crisis will likely get worse until voters demand that  politicians stop running up the federal debt to the unsustainable breaking point. So, what to do? Blame yourself for not working harder or spending less. Blame your President and Congress for screwing up the economy. And nurture your family relationship.

Source:

Diamond, L. M., and Hicks, A. M. (2011).”It’s the economy, honey!” Couples’ blame attributions during the 2007-2009 economic crisis. Personal Relationships. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2011.01380.x

See also my blog on learning and memory at http://thankyoubrain.blogspot.com

Who to blame for poor schools

Congress is now going through the ritual of tweaking the No Child Left Behind law for the nation’s schools. The law is vigorously opposed by both teacher unions and the TEA party. That should tell you all you need to know about this bad legislation. Of course the reasons for opposition are quite different, but all have a large degree of validity. Teachers don’t like bureaucrats judging them and their schools, and the TEA party thinks we have too much federal government intrusion in general.

The law, however tweaked by revision, is fatally flawed by its basic assumptions about what is to blame for poor educational achievement in this country. Foremost is the fantasy that government should provide not only equal opportunity but equal outcome. The only way you can get all students to have equal learning is to dumb down the curricula, which is what is done. Schools cater to the lower performing students at the expense of good students. For example, over the last two decades an analysis by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the lowest-performing students have shown clear gains in test scores but little improvement for other students.

A second flaw is that the law ignores the extraordinary range of mental development in children. Some students cannot be salvaged at a given grade level. Moreover, student motivation for learning is a highly mutable, often changing from year to year. Some students cannot be salvaged at any stage, either for reasons of neglect, abuse, bad parenting, or the students’ own negative attitudes. “Do-gooder” focus on these students drags down the whole educational enterprise.

Then there is the problem of misplaced incentives. Where are the incentives for students to do better? In fact, the students are being asked to help make their school and teachers look good.

Finally, this era of No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing fails to help us understand how to accomplish the basic purpose of assessment: figuring out what students know and need to learn. Multiple-choice tests are certainly not reliable. In fact, these tests mostly measure recognition memory, the least reliable indicator of what has been remembered.

One teacher, Ryan Kinser, endorses the idea of “teaching to the test,” but we need better tests: ones based on “curriculum-embedded performance assessments that are valid, reliable, and accurate measures of what and how students learned.” I would add that testing per se is not the problem. Indeed, research shows that tests reinforce retention of what has been learned. At a local school level, low-stakes benchmark tests should be routine and frequent.

Teachers do need to be held accountable and must share some of the blame. But not for the weaknesses of the culture of their community, or for bad school administrators and policies, or for the poor educations they get in Colleges of Education, or for the flawed requirements of No Child Left Behind.  Teachers have no control over many of the bad things schools do. The school year is too short, summer vacation is too long, more short holidays are needed, the school day needs to be restructured, most textbooks are just terrible, subjects are taught along academic themes rather than the integrated real world students live in, and the school environment in general just kills the joy of learning.

What should the role of the federal government be in education? It should be in administering meaningful educational research, providing guidance (not mandates) on academic standards, and disseminating “best practices.” No more, no less.

If all parties (government, principals, teachers, parents, and students) would accept their share of the blame, maybe we could make big improvements in education. As it is, everybody points the finger at somebody else.