Sam Harris Explores the Global Epidemic of Child Sexual Abuse

In his introduction to "The Worst Epidemic," Sam Harris warns that the subject matter might be difficult for listeners. The topic is the global epidemic of child sexual abuse involving children as young as one year old. Sam is joined by Gabriel Dance, a NYT reporter who has thoroughly investigated this issue. Until I forced myself to listen, I had assumed that this predatory behavior was relatively rare, but I was shocked to learn that sexual predators have exploited every corner of the Internet. To illustrate, Dance mentions that law enforcement experts estimate that of the 9 million citizens of New Jersey, 400,000 have been exposed to these highly illegal images and videos, some of this exposure being inadvertent, but much of it being intentional. It makes you wonder who we are, as a nation, that so many among us are willing to torture children. The tragedy is widespread, making the technical challenges and law enforcement needs overwhelming.

As a public service, Sam has put this episode in front of his paywall. The topic spirals in many directions, including the misleading concept of “child pornography,” the failure of governments and tech companies to grapple with the problem, the tradeoff between online privacy and protecting children, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, photo DNA, the roles played by specific tech companies, the ethics of encryption, “sextortion,” and the culture of pedophiles.

I am proud to say that I have been a paid subscriber of Making Sense for years. Sam Harris does a great job of exploring complex and oftentimes thorny issues unflinchingly, week after week.  From Sam's About Page:

His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

If you are unfamiliar with the work of Sam Harris, I invite you to listen to this Episode, or any Episodes of Making Sense.

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Evolutionary Psychologist Diana Fleischman Begins a New Blog at Psychology Today: “How to Train Your Boyfriend”

I've followed Diana Fleischman's work for many months. She's smart and funny, but takes her evolutionary psychology seriously every step of the way. Diana has started writing a column on Psychology Today titled, "How to Train Your Boyfriend." Here an excerpt from her opening post:

You have two grandmothers, four great grandmothers, 512 great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers and millions of grandmas further in your past, before the word grandma even existed. These grandmas that scraped by, suffered, and survived long enough to reproduce, are only a fraction of all the women that existed. One important characteristic that set grandmas apart from the millions of non-grandmas was their ability to shape the behavior of others, especially children and grandpas. You probably have grandmas who lived on farms trying to get multiple children to cooperate with (and not kill) one another and in villages where they had to manage their reputations for the good of their families. But you definitely have grandmas who convinced men to take care of them and their children. Without any one of them, and their abilities you wouldn’t exist to read this blog. We evolved to be able to get other people to do what we want.

But, how do people get other people to do what they want?

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A Quadruple Whammy That Results in Facebook Barking

Here's the quadruple whammy:

A) Confirmation Bias, B) Availability Heuristic and C) the Focussing Illusion and D) In-group loyalties.

These add up to an extremely dangerous personal hubris that we have no blindspots, that we know everything we need to know, and that our ideas are fully tested whereas we have simply enshrined them in our own brains, surrounding them with mental electrified fences. We need THIS daily vitamin: Our ideas need to be repeatedly tested by numerous uninterested or antagonistic OTHERS. We often commit medical malpractice when we pretend we are world-class doctors who can adequately diagnose our own thought processes.

I am fatiguing from meeting people who never ever doubt their mental hygiene and never worry about the need to run meaningful real-world tests on their own ideas. I'm getting worn out watching people bark at each other on FB instead of showing humility and a willingness to learn from each other. I want to ask so many people on FB: "Why are you here? To learn something new or merely to strut around looking for fully cooked allies?"

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Dishonest Zealots Attempt to Destroy the Career of Linguist Steven Pinker

Cognitive linguist Steven Pinker has had an illustrious career as a teacher and prolific author. His politics have often leaned to the left. None of this immunizes him from baseless attacks by hundreds of people who apparently don't see any value in Pinker's willingness to contribute his expertise to national conversations on critically relevant issues. They are unwilling to give fair readings to Pinker's statements. They also appear to be threatened by Pinker's use of germane statistics in order to shed light on complex claims involving police behavior and racism.

Here is the opening paragraph of a recent letter signed by almost 500 people, many of them grad students and undergrads, then sent to the Linguistic Society of America:

In reaction to this letter, Jerry Coyne, eminent Professor of Professor of Ecology & Evolution, concludes as follows at his website: "I’m really steamed when a group of misguided zealots tries to damage someone’s career, and does so dishonestly."

Linguist John McWhorter has also indicated his enthusiastic support of Steven Pinker:

Here is Jerry Coyne's full blog post, setting forth the numerous false accusations against Pinker coupled with the evidence clearly demonstrating that these accusations are false. Coyne's post is titled "The Purity Posse pursues Pinker."

I invite you to read both sides of this dispute.  I suspect you will be outraged at the way Pinker is being treated.  You might also wonder how it is that hundreds of people who claim to be highly knowledgeable in linguistics are such inept readers.  The phrase "social conflagration" might come to mind as you review the evidence.  The name Robespierre might periodically pop into your thought process.

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Suggestions For Dealing with Know-it-Alls

In "How to converse with know-it-alls," Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay suggest techniques for dealing with know-it-alls. Know-it-allness is often caused by the Dunning-Kruger Effect (which the authors also call "the Unread Library Effect" and cognitive scientists call "the illusion of explanatory depth."

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill; 2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others; 3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy; 4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

How do you show know-it-alls that they don't know as much as they think they know? Boghossian and Lindsay suggest that we ask them to explain their claims in detail.

[R]esearchers asked people to rate how confident they were in their ability to describe how a toilet works. Once subjects provided answers, experimenters had them write down as many details as they could in a short essay, and then they were again asked about their confidence. Their self-reported confidence dropped significantly after attempting to explain the inner workings of toilets. People know there’s a library of information out there explaining things — they just haven’t read it! Exposing the flimsiness of their knowledge is a simple matter of letting them discover it for themselves.

One most easily does this by asking know-it-alls to explain their claims in detail:

Whether it’s gun control legislation, immigration policy, or China trade tariffs — and have them provide as many technical details as they can. How, exactly, does it work? How will change be implemented? Who will pay for it? What agencies will oversee it? . . . People become less certain, question themselves more, and open their minds to new possibilities when they realize they know less than they thought they knew.

Just politely ask straightforward question and insist on answers that you can understand. Keep an open mind.  Perhaps they will convince you that they are correct! If you are not convinced, however, be patient and follow up with more questions.  If the conversation goes on and on, don't allow your fatigue to get the best of you.  Don't ever indicate that you understand when you don't.  That would not be helping anybody.

As I was reading the above article, I researched other ideas I could add to this post. The authors of, "An expert on human blind spots gives advice on how to think" discussed the DK effect with David Dunning, who warned of the First rule of the Dunning-Kruger Club: "people don’t know they're members of the Dunning-Kruger Club." These people lack "Intellectual Humility."  In other words, they assume they are correct, which means (to them) that there is no need to seek out and correct their intellectual blind spots.

Dunning offered this additional advice for dealing with people in the DK Club. One bit of advice is to challenge the know-it-all to think in terms of probabilities:

[P]eople who think not in terms of certainties but in terms of probabilities tend to do much better in forecasting and anticipating what is going to happen in the world than people who think in certainties.

Dunning warns that many people don't "make the distinctions between facts and opinion." People are increasingly creating not only their own opinions, but their own facts.

Yet another problem listed by Dunning is that people are increasingly unwilling to say "I don't know." Trying to get people to say that they don't know when they don't know is a serious and so far unsolvable problem. It would seem, then, that cross-examining the know-it-all as to the source of their information is critical.

Dunning also suggests a downside to getting things correct: "To get something really right, you’ve got to be overly obsessive and compulsive about it." In other words, it's not easy to get facts correct on a complex issue.  It takes work.  Those people who are more accurate take the time to ask themselves whether and how they could be wrong. "How can your plans end up in disaster?"  Know-it-alls fail to show this concern that it often takes a lot of work to get to the truth.

Finally, in a nod to John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Dunning states that it's important to realize that one is better off to invite others to test one's ideas.  Dunning states: "We’re making decisions as our own island, if you will. And if we consult, chat, schmooze with other

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