my first fraypost

A paper came out in Nature Neuroscience last week showing that in a go/no-go task (a hard task where you normally respond very quickly to a "go" stimulus, except when the "no-go" stimulus quickly follows), liberals have better performance as well as a much stronger conflict-related activity in the anterior cingulate:

Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism
Abstract: Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

Blogs and news coverage are all over this. And topping it off, Slate's Human Nature columnist, Saletan, came out firing with an article subtitled "Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid," the innacuracy and general irrelevance of which pushed me into Slate's comments "fray" for the first time:

There is no reason to be so down on this study. As far as it plays out in the press, you have to consider the motivations at work.

The translation of scientific findings into press accounts is often very inaccurate, especially in the field of cognitive neuroscience. What we find, and what makes sense - in a quick blurb - at the lay level is very rarely the same. The press is doing one job, and researchers are doing another.

From the research side of things, if there is a chance of getting press coverage, you work as much as you can to get it - and get it right! The NYU researcher's goal isn't to spread his personal opinion of conservatives, but to get news coverage so that they can get future funding and perhaps tenure. Those are the motivations here - if the government funding agencies have heard of your work in the press, you're more likely to be able to do all the really important foundational work that goes completely unnoticed. Further, to get your work in Nature Neuroscience, the paper needs to hype its importance and implications, yet another unfortunate source of distortion.

Just don't get so riled up that the translation between research and the press is so bad - on both sides - after all, shouldn't Human Nature know this already?

For the study's results, I think this is the first time that such a well-studied neural response as conflict monitoring has been shown to differ between liberals and conservatives - who would have thought! Impulsivity, extraversion, psychiatric disorders, and genetic differences have been related to conflict responses, but it is very cool that there may be a difference in a basic neural response between these groups. The actual study, stripped of its coating in implications, is solid - that was never contested in the column (nor would it be easy for an outsider to review it - but cheers for reading the supplement!).

As for "rigging a study," that claim is absurd. The goal of the study itself was likely focused on something completely unrelated to politics, with the survey on political orientation as one of many questionnaires. Finding the conflict response difference was probably quite a surprise.

Now, of course, this result may mean absolutely nothing about real-world behavior of liberals and conservatives - but this is a topic for future research. Maybe, just maybe, the NYU group can get money and prove something very interesting about the real-world behavior of these groups in the future. Just as long as there aren't so many nay-sayers out there...

(edited slightly)

Simulating cultural violence.

New simulation research in Science looks at cultural conflict. Results suggest that intermixing is great and otherwise large territories with discrete boundaries are best. The model as applied to Kosovo and present-day India gives some convincing figures. I'm giving the simulation the benefits of the doubt because it isn't my field, it is in Science, and because the senior author is the editor of a volume on complex systems theory that I bought back when I was into lots of stuff.

Reports

Global Pattern Formation and Ethnic/Cultural Violence

May Lim,^1,2 Richard Metzler,^1,3 Yaneer Bar-Yam^1* We identify a process of global pattern formation that causes regions to differentiate by culture. Violence arises at boundaries between regions that are not sufficiently well defined. We model cultural differentiation as a separation of groups whose members prefer similar neighbors, with a characteristic group size at which violence occurs. Application of this model to the area of the former Yugoslavia and to India accurately predicts the locations of reported conflict. This model also points to imposed mixing or boundary clarification as mechanisms for promoting peace.

conclusions:

Our results for the range of filter diameters that provide good statistical agreement between reported and predicted violence in the former Yugoslavia and India suggest that regions of width less than 10 km or greater than 100 km may provide sufficient mixing or isolation to reduce the chance of violence...

Our approach does not consider the relative merits of cultures, individual acts, or immediate causes of violence, but rather the conditions that may promote violence. It is worth considering whether, in places where cultural differentiation is taking place, conflict might be prevented or minimized by political acts that create appropriate boundaries suited to the current geocultural regions rather than the existing historically based state boundaries. Such boundaries need not inhibit trade and commerce and need not mark the boundaries of states, but should allow each cultural group to adopt independent behaviors in separate domains. Peaceful coexistence need not require complete integration.

Different cultures are spontaneously generated given spatial separation and sufficient population size, quite like speciation. But what do we do with the products, besides slowly work to end the influence of religion? Unlike speciation, we can interbreed and force our cultures to fuse with us!

LOL - does anyone else find the recent religion spat on facebook hilarious?

From the description of the facebook group "F**k Islam":

The Quran contains many lies and threats. Islam is false, no god exists, and someone should say that loud and clear. Heaven and hell are fables, prayer is a waste of time, and angels and jinn are obviously mythology.
This is not a group against Muslims. They have it bad enough. If you doubt that go to Palestine. If you hate Muslims or are here to harrass them or promote your religion, go away. Muslims can be and usually are peaceful and respectful.
The best thing for the whole world is a rejection of all religions and a renewed discovery of the love for humanity and naturalism.
Fuck Christianity and Judaism as well. These religions are just as false and have a variety of disadvantages. There are other groups devoted to each of these false ideologies. Here is one devoted to religion in general: http://unm.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2225572075
and here is one for Christianity: http://unm.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5857745671.

True true. I'm not endorsing the group, because I know nothing about it more than what I just read. And while using "f**k" isn't exactly mature, the controversy this group has generated is funny. There is of course a huge response group, "petiton: if "f**k Islam" is not shut down..we r quitting facebook," with misguided ideas about the "respect" due to any idea:

if the group "f**k Islam" and all similar disrespectful groups of religion are not shut down before the end of september..we are all goin to close our facebook accounts..and thats the least we can do to show our respect to religion and our disagreement of such humilating and ignorant groups. [sic!]

Is it just me, but isn't any point made in "internet grammar" immediately invalidated? You only need to respect a false (or anyway completely untestable) idea as much as you would my strongly-held contention that everyone bow down and sacrifice themselves before the omniscient Lord of Nutella. We need to break down the illusion that it is wrong to argue against religious ideas. The anti-Islam group is just exercising free speech, which might not be said about the threatening anti-anti-Islam groups out there. Game on!

[p.s. - I caught on to this controversy by stumbling on this new york times story]