Via Matthew Yglesias we learn that former Bush minion and permanent-war proponent John Bolton is also a follower of pull-it-out-of-your-ass evolutionary psychology. Quoth Bolton

You know, homo sapiens are hard-wired for violent conflict, and we’re not going to eliminate violent conflict until homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. And the whole notion you could even think about eliminating it not just in our lifetime but soon thereafter I think reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

Yglesias’s reply refutes not only Bolton but the core assumption of every evolutionary psychologist who’s ever flunked a biology, statistics, history, psychology, or logic course.

For comparison’s sake, note that homo sapiens are hard-wired to use stone spears to hunt and kill grazing animals for food. And yet, hunting grazing animals has become a pretty marginal phenomenon in human existence. Doing it as a primary means of subsistence, as opposed to a hobby, has become even more marginal. Doing it with stone tools is even more marginal, though it does of course still happen.

Read the quotes in context here.

Nicely put. If in just a generation or two we can transcend something that was so immediately, directly, and incontestably essential to human survival as the use of stone tools… something that dates back at least 1.5 million years no less… then we can probably also transcend impulses as marginally adaptive as 3-5% biases towards hip-waist ratios in mate selection. Assuming those ratios were ever selected to begin with.

A dramatic reading from Galileo, a play by Bertolt Brecht, English version by Charles Laughton. It’s the last scene in the play and not always performed. I don’t know how many people are familiar with the play (lots?) but it very strongly influenced, and now nicely illustrates, my understanding of stereotype and its impact on perception.

Scene 14

Before a little italian customs house early in the morning ANDReA sits upon one of his traveling trunks at the barrier and read Galileo’s book. The window of a small house is still lit, and a big grotesque shadow, like an old witch andher cauldron, falls upon the house wall beyond. Barefoot CHILDREN in rags see it and point to the little house.

CHILDREN (singing):
One, two three four, five, six,
Old Marina is a witch,
At night, on a broomstick she sits
And on the church steeple she spits.

CUSTOMS OFFICER (to ANDREA) [etc…]

Meanwhile a little council of war among the CHILDREN has taken place. ANDREA quietly watches. one of the BOYS pushes forward by the others, creeps up to the little house from which the shadow comes, and takes the jug of milk on the doorstep.

ANDREA (quickly): Whatever are you doing with that milk?
BOY (stopping in mid-movement): She is a witch.

The other CHILDREN run away behind the customs house. One of them shouts “Run, Paolo!”

ANDREA: Hmm! And because she is a witch she mustn’t have milk. Is that the idea?

BOY: Yes.

ANDREA: And how do you know she is a witch?

BOY (points to shadow on house wall): Look!

ANDREA: Oh! I see.

BOY: And she rids on a broomstick at night — and she bewitches the coachman’s horses. My cousin Luigi looked through the hole in the stable roof, that the snowstorm made, and heard the horses coughing something terrible.

ANDREA: Oh! How big was the hole in the stable roof?

BOY: Luigi didn’t tell. Why?

ANDREA: I was asking because maybe the horses got sick because it was cold in the stable. You had better ask Luigi how big that hole is.

BOY: You are not going to say Old Marina isn’t a witch because you can’t.

ANDREA: No, I can’t say she isn’t a witch. A man can’t know about a think he hasn’t looked into, or can he?

BOY: No! But THAT! (He points to the shadow.) She is stirring hellbroth.

ANDREA: Let’s see. Do you want to take a look? i can lift you up.

BOY: you lift me to the window, Mister! (He takes a slingshot out of his pocket.) I can really bash her from there.

ANDREA: Hadn’t we better make sure she is a witch before we shoot? I’ll hold that.

The BOY puts the milk jug down and follows him reluctantly to the window. ANDREA lifts the boy up so that he can look in.

ANDREA: What do you see?

BOY (slowly): Just an old girl cooking porridge.

ANDREA: Oh! Nothing to it then. Now look at her shadow, Paolo.

The BOY looks over his shoulder and back and compares the reality and the shadow.

BOY: The big thing is a soup ladle.

ANDREA: Ah! A ladle! You see, I would have taken it for a broomstick, but I haven’t looked into the matter as you have, Paolo. Here is your sling.

CUSTOMS OFFICER (returning with the CLERK and handing ANDREA his papers): All present and correct. Good luck, sir.

ANDREA goes, reading Galileo’s book. The CLERK starts to bring his baggage after him. The barrier rises. ANDREA passes through, still reading the book. The BOY kics over the milk jug.

BOY (shouting after ANDREA): She is a witch! She is a witch!

ANDREA: You saw with your own eyes: think it over!

The BOY joins the others. They sing:

One, two, three, four, five, six,
Old Marina is a witch.
At night, on a broomstick she sits
And on the church steeple she sits.

The CUSTOMS OFFICERS laugh. ANDREA goes.

Source: Galileo; Copyright 1966 by Eric Bentley, Grove Press ISBN: 0-8021-4050-5; pages 126-129

The Paolo effect is what I had in the back of my mind for yesterdays post, “Jill Filipovic’s Answer to the “No True Scotsfeminist” Fallacy.”

It’s not that the stereotypes are insurmountable — they’re not or else Adrea would have succumbed to the witchcraft over 500 years ago as would we today. But they’re often persistent even in the face of direct counter-evidence.

The author of Ask a Manager answers an unfamiliar question with grace and aplomb

[Question] “My co-worker is a very open person and tells me to cover for her every time she has to leave the office. Our boss and manager are not here half the time so when they are not, my co-worker leaves either early and/or takes a really long lunch. At the beginning, the excuse for leaving early was because of a date. But she later told me that she’s actually sleeping with people for money. She comes back all proud, telling me how much money she made in an hour.”

[Answer] I’d just be straightforward with her and tell her: “I don’t care what you do in your personal life, but while you’re off making money, you’re leaving me to pick up the slack here. You’re putting me in a bad position, because you’re asking me to cover for you and you’re leaving me with more work.”

Read the quote in context here.

The comment threads are pretty interesting too, some judgmental, some libertarian, some addressing it as a law and order question, others as a straight-up work problem.

A woman from New Zealand takes a similar approach to the Manager

Here in New Zealand it’s not an illegal activity and I would deal with it as suggested above. However if it was an illegal activity, say dealing drugs, then I would be informing management immediately.

The last comment at the moment (dated Nov. 30th) is from the author of the original question clarifying some of the assumptions in comments.

Well I wrote this email in an effort to guide me in the right direction, but really it is easier said than done. I totally agree that prostitution is illegal and she shouldn’t be doing that, but in reality it is a victimless crime. I can not call the cops on her because I just don’t have the heart to do that.

She is really a very good person and is an excellent mother. Most of the people who post comments here assume that since she is selling her body she must be a bad mother. She is not giving that example to her kids. For her kids she works only in the office. Her kids are her priority. Although, I do not agree with her spending habits she provides the best she can for her kids.

Kind of takes away some of the cartoonish shorthand in standard debates about sex work. She’s clearly not “trafficked,” and it would be very difficult to construct her as a victim, a thrall, or dehumanized. But she’s leaving her day-job co-workers holding the bag and pulling her freight plus abusing her responsibilities to her employer.

And yet more evidence that single, blanket characterizations of sex workers, or single, blanket policies for dealing with sex work, would be inadequate to its complexity.

Summary: An example of the political, law-enforcement, and practical problems of detecting vs. dealing with potential terrorists supports Echidne’s analysis of the problem with breast-cancer detection recommendations.

Matthew Yglesias discusses the difference between “common sense” anecdotal evidence and statistical evidence.

Suppose I invent a magical device that can be pointed at a Muslim and say with 90% accuracy whether or not he’s an al-Qaeda operative. Well, if I start waving it around and it starts beeping on one guy, what should we conclude about him? A terrifyingly large number of people are going to say “there’s a ninety percent chance he’s with al-Qaeda! Let’s panic!” In fact, that’s not the case. There are a billion Muslims in the world. A test with 90 percent accuracy is going to mistakenly classify about 100 million of them as al-Qaeda operatives. And al-Qaeda actually has fewer than 10,000 people working for it. I’m going to get something like 10,000 false positives for every actual terrorist I find.

Meanwhile, applying the test to people is going to have severe consequences. The public doesn’t understand this correctly and is going to be put into a wholly unwarranted state of panic about the prevalence of terrorists. People will, of course, demand that those flagged by my machine be subjected to extra-heightened scrutiny. It’s easy to imagine lots of innocent people being mistakenly killed or subjected to discrimination or shunning. And that sense of beseigement and unfair treatment would ultimately heighten tensions between the world’s Muslims and the West, while wasting massive quantities of law enforcement resources chasing basically worthless leads.

Read the quote in context here.

It seems odd to call a discussion of terrorism and racial profiling “non-controversial,” and perhaps even more odd for me to quote so extensively about something seemingly so remote from anything having to do with my main topics of relationships, sex, and gender.

Yet I bring it up to support a post by Echidne of the Snakes defending the statistics and methodology behind the new mammogram restrictions.

It was seriously principled, and courageous, for her to go out on a limb like that. Like a lot of problems in mitigation it’s easy to point to someone who benefitted from the status quo, but harder to identify those who suffered from it.

I think Yglesias’ post explaining the cost of more testing at certain ages (even if the tests were very accurate — which they aren’t in either Yglesias’ nor Echidne’s cases) would tend to overwhelm the system, and individuals, with false positives on the one hand, and still-treatable cases on the other.

Without intending any gender equivalencies, at all, it’s instructive to note that a similar situation arose in prostate cancer detection 10 or 15 years ago: PSA tests brought the price of detection down and the early detection way, way up. But, as you note, detection isn’t the same thing as treatment. At all. In fact detection isn’t even the same thing as understanding the disease!

For better or worse, because the imbalance between detection on the one hand and both understanding and treatment on the other hand was so lopsided it became a big problem for medical ethics: first, it turns out overwhelming numbers of men over 50 or so have detectable early prostate cancer. But for most it’s so slow to grow they die of old age before they can die of the cancer. For most but not all. Enough die, and die fairly horribly, to make treatment a consideration. But the treatments (burning off, cutting off, or poisoning) are generally so debilitating and expensive they shouldn’t be undertaken unless you’re sure it’s the bad kind. Which makes it a shame that researchers then, and now, still can’t tell whether an early cancer will go bad.

The line between the risks and benefits of breast-cancer testing are much harder to draw than prostate-cancer testing was. And so we’re stuck (or I should say “stuck”) with statistical analysis. Which is why it’s really nice to have a committed, ethical, and highly-interested statistician explain these particular findings for us. And with breast cancer the benefits are close enough to the costs (barring further progress in the development of treatment anyway) that it’s really hard to say what the right thing to do might be. And so we’re likely to run into really big shifts in the conclusions.

On a final note I especially appreciated Echidne’s explanation of not only the cost vs. benefit of testing, but how the cost incurred for marginally-valuable testing might be diverting funding from research into treatment or prevention. (emphasis mine.)

Screening is not treatment. To do it at all is based on the hope that early detection raises the odds of survival. This has been shown to be true for cervical cancer and the pap test and also for colon cancer screenings. But the most recent evidence suggests that breast cancer screening is less effective than previously thought. As I mentioned in an earlier post, researchers now suspect that mammograms capture a lot of tumors which might either disappear on their own or never grow much, while missing the very aggressive tumors which develop very rapidly. It is the latter types which are reflected in the mortality statistics

...

The choice to pay for screening (by both individuals and the society) is ultimately a value judgment. But resources are not infinite. If money is spent (by both individuals and the society) in one type of screening, it is not available for other types of screening or for other types of prevention or treatment.

It’s hard when answers aren’t cut and dried, and even harder when the ranges are so close you can get these big shifts in recommendations. And when it’s a controversial subject it’s even harder. Cool that she was willing to dig into it.

Update: See also Amanda Marcotte’s take, with another allusion to prostate cancer (it’s being downscaled too) and more backup links.