The Ash Twins Blog

According to this excerpted interview with Janine Roberts, author of Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel, diamond monopolist De Beers invented the tradition of a diamond engagement ring:

Diamonds became engagement stones around the end of the recession. Ernest Oppenheimer, who was in control of De Beers in the 1930s, was shutting down diamond mines to control supply and keep the price of diamonds high. He sent his son Harry to New York to meet with advertisers, because he realized that he couldn’t have diamonds being bought up just by rich people. They needed something that would appeal to everyone.

Well, everyone has to get engaged. So they spent a million pounds a year (about $1.7 million) to establish the diamond engagement ring as a sacrament — a spiritual thing. “Diamonds are forever.” They invented that and advertised it at every high school at the time. They got Paramount Studios involved by having the female stars wearing diamonds and by creating diamonds films. Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” and such. That advertising campaign created the myth.

This is an epic example of the power of advertising. De Beers invented a social norm requiring newlyweds to purchase an expensive diamond ring from De Beers. As of today, what was once an advertisement has become an institution of American culture, and its status as consumer manipulation is invisible. Even worse for us (but even better for De Beers), the manipulation has become self-enforcing: With the myth internalized, the receipt of a diamond engagement ring is rewarded with verbal approval, while the absence of a diamond engagement ring is punished by verbal disapproval and gossip.

David Barstow at the New York Times recently published a great article on the “Tea Party” movement. One of the interesting things, which might just be a product of Barstow’s reporting choices, is that elderly women are some of the most important activists in the movement:

As the meeting ended, Carolyn L. Whaley, 76, held up her copy of the Constitution. She carries it everywhere, she explained, and she was prepared to lay down her life to protect it from the likes of Mr. Obama.

“I would not hesitate,” she said, perfectly calm. . . .

He felt compelled to do something, so he decided to start a chapter of Mr. Beck’s 9/12 Project. He reserved a room at a pizza parlor for a Glenn Beck viewing party and posted the event on Craigslist. “We had 110 people there,” Mr. Stevens said. He recalled looking around the room and thinking, “All these people — they agree with me.”

Leah Southwell’s turning point came when she stumbled on Mr. Paul’s speeches on YouTube. (“He blew me away.”) Until recently, Mrs. Southwell was in the top 1 percent of all Mary Kay sales representatives, with a company car and a frenetic corporate life. “I knew zero about the Constitution,” Mrs. Southwell confessed. Today, when asked about her commitment to the uprising, she recites a line from the Declaration of Independence, a Tea Party favorite: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” . . .

[Tea Party author Richard Mack] said he has found audiences everywhere struggling to make sense of why they were wiped out last year. These audiences, he said, are far more receptive to critiques once dismissed as paranoia. It is no longer considered all that radical, he said, to portray the Federal Reserve as a plaything of the big banks — a point the Birch Society, among others, has argued for decades.

People are more willing, he said, to imagine a government that would lock up political opponents, or ration health care with “death panels,” or fake global warming. And if global warming is a fraud, is it so crazy to wonder about a president’s birth certificate?

“People just do not trust any of this,” Mr. Mack said. “It’s not just the fringe people anymore. These are just ordinary people — teachers, bankers, housewives.” . . .

A popular T-shirt at Tea Party rallies reads, “Proud Right-Wing Extremist.” . . .

[66-year-old Tea Party organizer Pam] Stout said she has begun to contemplate the possibility of “another civil war.” It is her deepest fear, she said. Yet she believes the stakes are that high. Basic freedoms are threatened, she said. Economic collapse, food shortages and civil unrest all seem imminent.

“I don’t see us being the ones to start it, but I would give up my life for my country,” Mrs. Stout said.

A lot of the anger in the Tea Party movement stems from the mass political voicelessness imposed by the two-party political system. The Republicans and Democrats are often in agreement on issues that many people have highly divergent views about. Meanwhile, voting for a third-party candidate often helps the mainstream candidate that is farther away from you ideologically. I have a limited knowledge of the history in this area, but it seems like right-wing third-party movements have been more successful and durable in American politics. This phenomenon is counterintuitive to the extent that  right-wing attitudes are associated with authoritarian attitudes, which would predict support among right-wing individuals for the extant political hierarchy.

The following bullet points summarize the results from recent empirical work on the effects of religion:

• Eskin 2004: “Suicide ideation was more frequent in adolescents undergoing secular education than in those undergoing religious education. The secular group was more accepting of suicide than the religious group. Those from the religious group, however, were more accepting of a suicidal close friend than their secular counterparts.”
• Lehrer 1995: Religious denomination has a significant effect on the choice of women whether to enter the labor market. Women in interfaith marriages are more likely to enter the labor market.
• Evans & Schwab 1995: Attending a Catholic school is associated with a 13-percent increase in the probability of finishing high school and going to college.
• Brown & Taylor 2007: Church attendance in adulthood is associated with higher educational attainment.
• Gruber 2004: Government subsidies to charitable giving reduce religious attendance, suggesting that charitable giving and religious attendance are substitutes.
• Torgler 2006: Religiosity is associated with a higher intrinsic motivation to pay taxes.
• Hoxby 1994: There is some evidence that the competition provided by private schools improves the quality of public schools as measured by the success of alumni.

Carassius carassius, better known as the goldfish, is another fish of interest to comparative neuroanatomists. The fish has an exceptionally large vagal lobe, a brain stem structure which mediates swallowing, among other things.

Aside: the name vagal comes from the vagus nerve, which is the major input and output nerve of the vagal lobe. Vagus, which means ‘wandering’ in Latin (think vagrant), refers to the fact that the vagus nerve is the only cranial nerve [of twelve] which ‘travels’ outside the cranial cavity to mediate sensation and motility of the viscera. In fact, the vagus nerve, also known as the tenth cranial nerve, is the primary way that the brain communicates with the heart, stomach, and intestines.

Figure 1 demonstrates the vagal lobe in a partially dissected goldfish.

As you have may have noticed at some point at the pet store, goldfish eat by iteratively swallowing and spitting out big chunks of food. This feeding behavior is more subtle than it looks: goldfish are able to take in large mouthfuls of pebbles mixed with a bit of food, sort through the contents, and selectively eject the debris. This ability is mediated by the vagal lobe.

Under the microscope, the vagal lobe is quite impressive (Fig. 2a). It is comprised of 15 distinct layers (compare this to the mammalian neocortex’s 6 layers), with the 11 superficial layers mediating gustatory sensation (taste), the middle two layers allowing entry and exit of axon fibers, and the deep layers controlling contraction and relaxation of the throat (pharyngeal) muscles. The vagal lobe is a topographic map of the goldfish’s throat (pharynx) – that is, different parts of the lobe represent different parts of the throat (superficial layers sense taste in that patch of throat and deep layers control muscle tone in that patchof throat), and adjacent parts of the vagal lobe represent adjacent parts of the throat in neural tissue.

As schematized in Fig. 2b, when edible material touches one side of the goldfish’s throat, taste information from chemoreceptors on that patch of oral epithelium is communicated in the vagus nerve to the superficial layers of the vagal lobe. Superficial vagal lobe neurons integrate this information and project straight down into the deep motor layers of the same patch of vagal lobe. These projections make excitatory glutamatergic synapses onto inhibitory GABAergic interneurons in the deep layers of the vagal lobe. The inhibitory interneurons in turn inhibit the motor neurons which project back to the muscle fibers at the same patch of throat that the edible material touched. These motor neurons rhythmically drive the contraction of the throat muscles to expel debris, so when they are inhibited, the muscle lining this fraction of the throat will stay relaxed, and material in this fraction will be selectively retained.

This impressive sensorimotor reflex allows goldfish to vacuum heterogeneous debris from the lake bottom and efficiently sort the chum from the chaff. The vagal lobe’s topographic laminar architecture minimizes the wiring necessary to mediate this spatially-localized sorting function.

Second aside: Note that in mammals, the vagal lobe homologue is bifurcated into separate sensory and motor nuclei. Gustatory sensation (along with visceral sensation to the gut) is localized to the nucleus tractus solitarius, whereas motor output to the throat (and the rest of the gastrointestinal tract) is localized to the nucleus ambiguus. That these nuclei lack the intricate layering of the goldfish vagal lobe comports with their less complex and noninteracting functions.

Sources

Finger (2007) “Sorting food from stones: the vagal taste system in Goldfish,Carassius auratus”

Striedter (2008) Principles of Brain Evolution.

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone provides a concise history of how the investment banks became the prime beneficiaries of the government response to the financial crisis.

First, the government’s peculiar bailout of AIG precluded it from entering normal bankruptcy procedures, which would have reserved an equitable amount of AIG’s assets for all of its creditors:

As AIG headed into a tailspin that fateful summer of 2008, it looked like the beleaguered firm wasn’t going to have the money to pay off the bogus insurance. So Goldman and other banks began demanding that AIG provide them with cash collateral. In the 15 months leading up to the collapse of AIG, Goldman received $5.9 billion in collateral. Société Générale, a bank holding lots of mortgage-backed crap originally underwritten by Goldman, received $5.5 billion. These collateral demands squeezing AIG from two sides were the “Swoop and Squat” that ultimately crashed the firm. . . .

When a company like AIG is about to die, it isn’t supposed to hand over big hunks of assets to a single creditor like Goldman; it’s supposed to equitably distribute whatever assets it has left among all its creditors. Had AIG gone bankrupt, Goldman would have likely lost much of the $5.9 billion that it pocketed as collateral. “Any bankruptcy court that saw those collateral payments would have declined that transaction as a fraudulent conveyance,” says Barry Ritholtz, the author of Bailout Nation. Instead, Goldman and the other counterparties got their money out in advance — putting a torch to what was left of AIG. . . .

[A]ccording to the terms of the bailout deal struck when AIG was taken over by the state in September 2008, Goldman was paid 100 cents on the dollar on an additional $12.9 billion it was owed by AIG — again, money it almost certainly would not have seen a fraction of had AIG proceeded to a normal bankruptcy. Along with the collateral it pocketed, that’s $19 billion in pure cash that Goldman would not have “earned” without massive state intervention.

Second, the investment banks were allowed to masquerade as commercial banks, which gave them access to loans from the Federal Reserve at zero-percent interest:

Less than a week after the AIG bailout, Goldman and another investment bank, Morgan Stanley, applied for, and received, federal permission to become bank holding companies — a move that would make them eligible for much greater federal support. The stock prices of both firms were cratering, and there was talk that either or both might go the way of Lehman Brothers, another once-mighty investment bank that just a week earlier had disappeared from the face of the earth under the weight of its toxic assets. . . .

When Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley got their federal bank charters, they joined Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and the other banking titans who could go to the Fed and borrow massive amounts of money at interest rates that, thanks to the aggressive rate-cutting policies of Fed chief Ben Bernanke during the crisis, soon sank to zero percent. The ability to go to the Fed and borrow big at next to no interest was what saved Goldman, Morgan Stanley and other banks from death in the fall of 2008. . . .

In fact, the Fed became not just a source of emergency borrowing that enabled Goldman and Morgan Stanley to stave off disaster — it became a source of long-term guaranteed income. Borrowing at zero percent interest, banks like Goldman now had virtually infinite ways to make money. In one of the most common maneuvers, they simply took the money they borrowed from the government at zero percent and lent it back to the government by buying Treasury bills that paid interest of three or four percent. It was basically a license to print money — no different than attaching an ATM to the side of the Federal Reserve.

“You’re borrowing at zero, putting it out there at two or three percent, with hundreds of billions of dollars — man, you can make a lot of money that way,” says the manager of one prominent hedge fund. “It’s free money.”

The New York Times summarizes the results of an Archives of Internal Medicine article (subscription required) documenting the widespread funding of residency training programs by pharmaceutical companies:

More than half of the nation’s medical residency programs to train doctors in internal medicine accepted financial support from the drug industry, even though three-fourths of the programs’ directors said accepting the aid was “not desirable,” a survey found.

At issue are potential conflicts of interest as the residency programs accept drug company support to help train tens of thousands of new doctors at a point in their careers when they are beginning to prescribe drugs, according to the survey report. . . .

The survey, conducted in 2006 and 2007, found that drug companies paid for educational materials like pocket guides in 83 percent of the programs that accepted support, meals in 90 percent, office supplies in 68 percent and drug samples in 57 percent.

Medical residency programs in the southern United States were much more likely to accept the industry largess than those in the Northeast — 72 percent to 47 percent. The overall rate of accepting drug industry financing was 55 percent, but that was down from the 88 percent level reported in a 1990 survey. . . .

Other surveys have indicated that medical residents do not think that their own actions are influenced by industry gifts, but that they do think that their colleagues are influenced. Surveys have also shown that gifts as small as a pen or food can influence prescribing patterns.

At the New York Times, Stanley Fish discusses a new book by Stephen Smith on the hollowness of secular arguments in defending normative positions:

[The debate about religious and secular reasoning] takes another turn if one argues, as the professor of law Steven Smith does in his new book, “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse,” that there are no secular reasons, at least not reasons of the kind that could justify a decision to take one course of action rather than another.It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain. . . .

Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?” . . .

Secular reason — reason cut off from any a priori stipulations of what is good and valuable — can take us a long way. We’ll do fine as long as we only want to find out how many X’s or Y’s there are or investigate their internal structure or discover what happens when they are combined, and so forth.

But the next step, the step of going from observation to evaluation and judgment, proves difficult, indeed impossible, says Smith, for the “truncated discursive resources available within the downsized domain of ‘public reason’ are insufficient to yield any definite answer to a difficult issue — abortion, say, or same sex marriage, or the permissibility of torture . . . .” If public reason has “deprived” the natural world of “its normative dimension” by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, “could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?” . . . This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the “pure” investigation of “observable facts.” It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so.

Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed? By “smuggling,” Smith answers.

. . . the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway — but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.

The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include “notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian ‘final causes’ or a providential design,” all banished from secular discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a direction — to even get started — “we have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversations — to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise.”

And how do we do that? Well, one way is to invoke secular concepts like freedom and equality — concepts sufficiently general to escape the taint of partisan or religious affiliation — and claim that your argument follows from them. But, Smith points out (following Peter Westen and others), freedom and equality — and we might add justice, fairness and impartiality — are empty abstractions. Nothing follows from them until we have answered questions like “fairness in relation to what standard?” or “equality with respect to what measures?” — for only then will they have content enough to guide deliberation.

That content, however, will always come from the suspect realm of contested substantive values. Is fairness to be extended to everyone or only to those with certain credentials (of citizenship, education, longevity, etc.)? Is it equality of opportunity or equality of results (the distinction on which affirmative action debates turn)? Only when these matters have been settled can the abstractions do any work, and the abstractions, in and of themselves, cannot settle them. Indeed, concepts like fairness and equality are normatively useless, except as rhetorical ornaments, until they are filled in by some partisan or ideological or theological perspective, precisely the perspectives secular reason has forsworn. Therefore, Smith concludes, “conversations in the secular cage could not proceed very far without smuggling.”

I agree with Fish and Smith, as far as they go. But I think they are wrong that normative arguments based on secular premises are just religious arguments in disguise. Neither secular nor religious values provide a coherent backbone for moral reasoning — there must be something lurking underneath, and I think that answer is found in human psychology. Humans are evolved to to have unshakable intuitions about right and wrong. Arguments — whether secular or religious — are usually just window dressing.

In a review of “the new synthesis” in moral psychology, Haidt describes the following remarkable experiment:

We easily switch into “intuitive prosecutor” mode (24), using our reasoning capacities to challenge people’s excuses and to seek out—or fabricate—evidence against people we don’t like. Thalia Wheatley and I (12) recently created prosecutorial moral confabulations by giving hypnotizable subjects a  post-hypnotic suggestion that they would feel a flash of disgust whenever they read a previously neutral word (“take” for half the subjects; “often” for the others). We then embedded one of those two words in six short stories about moral violations (e.g., accepting bribes or eating one’s dead pet dog) and found that stories that included the disgust-enhanced word were condemned more harshly than those that had no such flash.

To test the limiting condition of this effect, we included one story with no wrongdoing, about Dan, a student council president, who organizes faculty-student discussions. The story included one of two versions of this sentence: “He [tries to take]/[often picks] topics that appeal to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion.” We expected that subjects who felt a flash of disgust while reading this sentence would condemn Dan (intuitive primacy), search for a justification (post-hoc reasoning), fail to find one, and then be forced to override their hypnotically induced gut feeling using controlled processes. Most did. But to our surprise, one third of the subjects in the hypnotic disgust condition (and none in the other) said that Dan’s action was wrong to some degree, and a fewcame upwith the sort of post-hoc confabulations that Gazzaniga reported in some split-brain patients, such as “Dan is a popularity-seeking snob” or “It just seems like he’s up to something.” They invented reasons to make sense of their otherwise inexplicable feeling of disgust.

Humans have exceptionally large brains relative to their body size (about 2% of body mass). Perhaps surprisingly, some animals have brains which are even larger relative to body size. Take the mormyrid electric fish (better known as the elephant nose), whose brain takes up 3% of its body mass. The majority of this size increase is represented by a pornographically enlarged valvula, the medial lobe of the cerebellum (Fig. 1). In this species, the valvula takes on complex electrosensory and electromodulatory functions.

Fig.1 Sagittal section through the brain of a Mormyrid electric fish. Note the exceptionally large valvula dorsally. TH - thalamus, hyp - hypothalamus, Dm - dorsalis pars medialis, LC - caudal lobe, LP - posterior lateral line lobe, lfb - lateral forebrain bundle. Courtesy Prechtl et al. (1998).

In animals, muscles are electrically controlled: influxes and effluxes of electrically charged ions into myofiber cells drive the contraction and relaxation of muscles. Subsequently, animal motion generates electric fields. Due to the high conductance of water, these electrical fields can be sensed by marine life. Electrosensation allows fish to localize other animals in three dimensions, either for help in interception (in the case of sharks) or evasion (in the case of mormyrids). This sixth sense provides a high-speed complement to the slower-timescale chemosensation (i.e. smell).

In the case of mormyrids, not only can these animals sense electric fields in the nearby water, they can also induce electric fields around them. This ability aids navigation in turbid waters and can serve as a jamming signal to misdirect electrosensing carnivores. The valvula is believed to compute the fearsome biophysical differential equations necessary to perform this stealth operation.

Source: Striedter 2008 Principles of Brain Evolution

The common crow is a surprisingly intelligent creature. Consider this experiment: Catch a crow and wait until he is hungry. Place a tasty treat in a cup narrow enough that the crow won’t be able to fit his beak into it. Then, give the crow a straightened paper clip.

Before long, the hungry crow will pick up the paper clip and jab it down into the cup, attempting to impale the treat. If the treat is so slippery that this spearing strategy won’t work, the crow will eventually curve the end of the paper clip to form a hook. He’ll fish out the treat and claim his prize.

All of this with only a rudimentary cerebral cortex. After reptiles and mammals diverged, mammals evolved the layered-and-folded structure known as the neocortex, the incredible size of which in primates is believed to underlie problem solving skills. Reptiles and subsequently birds, on the other hand, evolved a unique deep brain nucleus called the dorsal ventricular ridge, which has no obvious homologue in mammals. In intelligent birds (like corvids and parrots), the dorsal ventricular ridge is massive, and has evolved connections, organization, and functions surprisingly similar to that of the neocortex in mammals.

Source: Striedter (2008) Principles of Brain Evolution