Drivers of expensive cars tend to drive their privilege

My gut feeling borne out . . . Drivers of expensive cars are more likely to drive like jerks. These studies explore driver behavior in four-way intersections.

A research team including Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner have been examining the way social status and wealth affects morality. Their findings — which are getting a lot of media attention — broadly show that wealthier, higher-status individuals are, essentially, more likely to cheat.
I've explored this topic previously here. John Nichols and William McChesney gathered enough evidence on this topic of wealth privilege to fill an entire book: Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America. Also, check out the new podcast of Michael Lewis, Against the Rules. I've only heard the intro podcast so far ("Ref, You Suck"), but this is podcasting at its best.

The study at the top, involving an simple traffic intersection with simple well-known rules, seemed like an especially good illustration that a disproportionate number of wealthy people feel and act out their privilege, even out in the open.

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Coddled Children Grow up Self-Disruptive

In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Attorney Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE) and moral psyhchologist Jonathan Haidt address America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. Increasing numbers of people are claiming that they cannot cope with ideas that challenge their own world view. They sometimes claim that ideas that challenge their own ideas are "not safe." In dozens of well-publicized cases, rather than work to counteract "bad" ideas with better ideas, they work to muzzle speaker by disrupting presentations or even running the purportedly offensive speakers off campus. There is a related and growing problem. We cannot talk with each other at all regarding many many important issues. We shout each other down and use the heckler's veto. These maladies are especially prominent on some American college campuses, but these problems are also rapidly spreading to the country at large, including corporate America. Consider this 2016 example featuring the students of Yale having a "discussion" with Professor Nicholas Christakis: You would never guess it from this video alone, but this mass-meltdown was triggered after child development specialist Erika Christakis (wife of Nicholas), sent this email to students. This incident at Yale is one of many illustrations offered by Haidt and Lukianoff as evidence of a disturbing trend.  Here's another egregious example involving Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College who was run out of her college after committing the sin of writing this email to a student.  More detail here.  The authors offer this as the genesis of the overall problem:

In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
The solution offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is to take a moment to stop to recognize what they call the “Three Bad Ideas.”

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Haidt on Anti-Fragility and the Safety Culture

n this lecture, Jonathan Haidt describes the new Manichean culture, where some groups of people are inherently good and other are inherently bad. Many of the "good" groups have found power in victimhood, demanding (and getting, especially at universities) protection from the authorities. This "safety culture" has proven to be debilitating, infantilizing the protected group. What they actually need is challenges and hurdles, which will make them stronger. People are anti-fragile. As shown with bones, immune systems and helicopter parenting, lack of insult weakens individuals. Haidt argues that all of this dependence culture has the opposite effect than the one intended. The only group subjected to challenges and insults without no societal support are straight white men (11:00 min), which is much better preparation for holding a job than a lifetime of victimhood, dependence and safety culture.

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Read more about the article A 2,500 Year Old Warning About Our President

A 2,500 Year Old Warning About Our President

Aesop had a tale that is quite apropos right now: The Frogs Desiring a King (a.k.a "King Log and King Stork") is about a group clamoring for a strong handed leader, someone to declare moral rules and enforce them on the people. The Republicans (the party currently wanting to have government enforce ones personal morality, especially in the bedroom) chose Trump (as amoral an individual who ever took the proverbial throne) and somehow got him into power. Splash. The Democrats, aghast at the dangerous ignorance and exemplary incompetence of this purported moral leader, strive to have him impeached; to oust this King Log. So who would be our King Stork? Pence, a man who is neither uneducated nor incompetent. One who is actually a willing enforcer of a particular moral code, a one size fits all set of rules that most Americans don't actually live by, but some few vocal ones want to enforce it on everyone. This, despite the constitutional prohibition about the government enforcing the moral codes of a particular religion, is why he had the second seat next to the regularly bankrupt (both morally and financially) head of state. So, from frying pan into fire?

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About Google Scientist James Damore

I know I'm late to the game on this Google incident, but this is such a good illustration about how we, as a society, are unable to talk and think about serious issues except through our ideological filters. Further, some questions that can be explored through science apparently should no longer be even raised. First, a comment from a Gizmodo article by Melanie Ehrenkranz, who characterizes former Google Engineer James Damore as follows: "The man thinks women are inferior to men as engineers." That is typical of a lot of how Damore has been treated on the Internet. Now consider the basic facts about what Damore wrote at Google:

Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo says that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences. According to research he cited, those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait). Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.
Damore has given detailed interviews about what happened at Google and why he wrote his comments. That includes this interview with Joe Rogan:

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