When I argue that local/organic food is inethical, I am arguing against the status quo. Most people say that consuming these foods is an ethical act and that people who consume them are more good than people who do not.

According to psychologists, humans have a moral credential system. When you do something good, it changes the way you think so that you’re less likely to do good in the future. There are two possible explanations:

• you gain a bias in evaluating your own behaviour (“I do good things. I did x. Therefore x is good.”)
• you have a mental moral account: if the account has a surplus, you’re going to make withdrawals

A study at UofT found that people who were forced to purchase green products then went on to share less, lie more and steal more than those forced to purchase non-green products. (Here’s the short paper, but you’re better off reading the Slate commentary.)

If you believe that buying local/organic food is good and you incorporate buying such food into your identity (and I believe it’s impossible not to), then you’re going to put less effort into doing other good works. By analogy, watch a grocery store parking lot as people load reusable bags into SUVs. Local/organic food is a positional good, so people fixate on consuming it to make themselves cool while ignoring all the less glamorous good things they could be doing.

I’m interested in the case of George Sodini: the lonely 48-year-old who shot up an LA fitness club. His blog posts, while not exactly sane, are easier to relate to than the misogynist psychotic rage mass murderers usually leave behind. Most analysis has focused on his relationship with women or his family, but as Alex noted, it seems like his problems had as much to do with friendship, aging, work, etc.

I came across this blog written by someone who is well-read in psychology. Apparently one of the themes is diagnose behaviour that is antisocial but not sociological nor psychopathic as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (or at least narcissistic personality spectrum). The author did a detailed reading of Sodini’s blog that got a number of interesting comments including this existential analysis [layout edited]:

“I guess some of us were simply meant to walk a lonely path…Some were simply meant to walk a lonely path in life.”

Intellectually he seems to understand a simple truth in life. But emotionally he couldn’t accept it and so this giant fountain of a blog before the final act. How many people live analogous lives but learn the acceptance because the alternative is … what? Annihilation?

The blog goes on to offer a psychological profile of Sodini, arguing that Sodini was not mysoginistic and women were not really his focus. Interesting comments, mixed with some trolling, continue, including this Nietzschean analysis:

[His] problem is a lack of functioning power process. I refer to the noted philosopher Theodore Kaczynski on this one. Essentially, [he felt] like no matter what efforts [he] put in, [he couldn't] achieve success with women. A lack of self-efficacy, and trust me this is both well identified and perhaps over-appelated. Rewards are not commensurate with action, so while you can’t condone pulling into a fitness center and shooting up the place, you can certainly understand it. Because these women symbolize some failure to act on the world, they are targets for dislike and hate. OK, fair– but you have to decide whether to act on those feelings or try to remove their source.

And the final word goes to this simple observation: “He killed people that didn’t notice his suffering.”

Positive Organizational Scholarship is the (unfortunately-named) use of the positive psychology frame in organizational psychology and management studies. The gist of these positive scholarships is that modernist disciplines concentrate on the difference between bad and normal and ignore the difference between normal and good.

I’ve managed to align my homework with my personal interests by writing a paper on organizational virtousness. The foundational paper of the concept contains an awesome table (that I’ve modified a bit): traditional scholarship studies the left and middle columns, positive scholarship studies the right column.

* Is there a word for better-than-sustainable? When I asked Sara she said we don’t need a word for something imaginary.

A while ago I polled my family and friends to get a list of values that they think I hold. The list my method produced was obviously not orthagonal: some values, such as order and neatness, were obviously close to synonyms. I experimented a bit with using Google hits to calculate orthagonality (eg: hits for “order” + hits for “neatness” / hits for “order AND neatness”) but got some nonsense results.

The five personality factors were extracted from adjectives of language using factor analysis: a statistical method for finding orthagonal factors. I looked into using that analysis of language on my values. The first issue is that the factor analysis is not trivial: most adjectives are loaded on more than one factor, suggesting that a model called “the Abridged Big Five-Dimensional Circumplex” (AB5C) is more appropriate. I am nowhere close to understanding it, but I think the model basically says that five-dimensional personality space is not Euclidean but Elliptic.

Applying personality results to values also raises the question: what’s the difference between values and traits? It turns out there is some research that finds very definite links. I haven’t had time to read this research yet, but I’m guessing that traits drive non-conscious behaviour and values drive conscious behaviour – the gap between them is cognitive dissonance.

Related to both values and traits are the 24 character strengths that are one of the foundations of positive psychology. The strengths were generated from factor analysis of the values of many cultures and are experimentally supported. They get organized into six virtues that I’ve heard do not hold up under factor analysis, although I haven’t gotten around to reading the studies (so think of them as mnemonics).

Playing to your strengths is one of the best ways to be happy. So focusing on your strengths is probably more useful than traits or values. I have a bunch more research to do (and maybe some movies to watch) before I figure out where to go from here…

I was given the assignment to do the Learning Style Inventory based on Kolb’s Experiential Learning model. I scored in the 99th percentile* for abstract conceptualization! I might be pretty abstract and pretty conceptual, but I don’t buy that I am such a beautiful and unique snowflake.

I believe this is a subject-expectancy effect: I expect to my learning style to be abstract-conceptual so I choose answers to confirm my expectation. It’s a pre-test effect because the reason I expect that is other personality and learning tests I’ve taken in the past.

This makes me wonder about the validity of this test (and similar self-reports), but at least we weren’t using the neuro-linguistic programming model that highschool teachers seem to think is scientific: visual, auditory, kinesthetic and the other one.

* An unpublished draft of this post said “100th percentile”, which is impossible because I am in the sample.

DJ AM died tonight just before they lowered Ted Kennedy into Arlington.

It looks like a drug overdose. I’ve read that the unfortunate truth behind most overdoses is suicide. Regular drug users know how much to take but when pain gets involved people seem to just keep going.

AM was suffering survivor guilt and PTSD from his plane crash late last year. For those of you who dug Celebrity Rehab he performed with Shifty Binzer’s band Crazy Town. You might remember one of his big “drugs are fun” tracks with Oakenfold:

Most people are going to remember AM from Entourage in the episode where Turtle is hunting Fukijama kicks. He of the “I AM AM” license plate.

Anyway, serious reality: Depression and stress kill. Take it away AM:

Myers-Briggs is basically some stuff Jung made up off the top of his head. Since it was invented, research has found it to be kind-of scientific. It’s not concise: the factors are correlated (eg: Intraversion and Thinking) so it could be that a different set of factors would describe a person in less variables. It’s not complete: emotional stability is intentionally left out of Myers-Briggs so nobody’s feelings get hurt.

So to develop a new trait model, psychologists took all the words that are used to describe peoples’ personalities and checked which ones were correlated: they fall into five piles (all the armchair theorists in history were wrong). The Five Factor Model is concise, complete and precise: different ways of measuring yield the same result. The problem is that it’s always presented with a normative interpretation: you are a better person if you score higher on each factor (even though high scores are correlated with some negative things). A Five Factor terminology called “SLOAN” gives more neutral names, I’ve adapted them here:

* Researchers are divided on what factor V actually represents: “openness”, “intellect”, “imagination” and “culture” are some terms. In general, the terms hide the nuance in each factor, so don’t confuse the popular meaning of the term with its operational definition.

To my knowledge, no one has come up with cutesy names for the 32 poles in five-factor space. This apparently-first-year psychology paper provides a good overview of extensions and criticisms of the model.

Martin Seligman is usually considered the founder of positive psychology. In 2004 he gave an introductory talk at TED, where he says positive psychology studies three things:

• pleasure
• engagement
• meaning

Seligman basically says nothing about meaning (but Wikipedia’s Meaning of life is an excellent overview). Engagement is effectively synonymous with flow/wu wei. Pleasure is 50% heritable (which explains why winning the lottery doesn’t make you much happier in the long run) but the other 50% can be changed.

Seligman has both academic and commercial sites with a bunch of questionnaires. The only intervention he talks about for engagement is to restructure unengaging tasks to focus on “character strengths” (although there are others). To increase pleasure there are at least two effective engagements:

• gratitude training (eg: a “good times” journal, writing letters of gratitude)
• mindfulness

Mindfulness is supposedly based on Buddhist meditation, but I think there’s some confusion. As I see it, Buddhist meditation includes two kinds of mindfulness:

• awareness of the present moment external to the self
• meta-consciousness: observing the structure of the self (the “monkey mind”) to transcend the present

The purpose of awareness training in psychology is to increase the pleasure gained and retained from pleasant experiences. When the sense of self is removed to savor an experience, you increase pleasure. When the sense of self is removed in carrying out a task, you increasing engagement. There is a correlation between these but I don’t think positive psychology understands the causal relationship yet.

One of the most fundamental laws of evolutionary psychology is that women are pickier about their mates than men. They’re picky because women invest more in offspring from growing eggs to dropping junior off at soccer practice. This law is used to explain all sorts of facts of modern life, particularly in dating theory.

This hypothesis can be easily tested in speed dating: do men choose more partners for follow-up than women? Recent research finds that small manipulations to the speed dating ritual result in the opposite outcome predicted by evolutionary psychology. In conclusion, the fundamental behavior of women is socially constructed and the entire field of evolutionary psychology is modernist bullshit.

Via Treehugger, via BB: If you want to be really kind to the environment don’t have any kids.

Of course, then you’re breeding altruism out of the gene pool. That’s probably for the best, though. Altruism is apparently a survival counterindication now, best not to torment the consciences of the little darlings. Of course, if you have kids anyway congrats! You didn’t need to worry: You’re not an altruist! Now head down to your local GM dealer and buy all the SUVs you need to protect your oxytocin-high-inducing munchkins.

Poor humanity: Smart enough to know about degenerate prisoners’ dilemmas, but too stupid to solve them.

To complement my bitter, bitter outlook I had onions drenched in vinegar today for lunch. I realized how far gone I was when I received terrific customer service from the counter — it actually kind of freaked me out.

“Wow,” thought I, “these people are helpful, prompt, friendly, smiling, and laugh at my ironic mannerisms… How uncomfortable.”

I think I’m getting a kind of assholishness Stockholm Syndrome. I vacillate between “Mean People Suck” and “Fuck Nice People, They’re Just Stupid” pretty regularly.

Anyway, that was certainly not the customer service experience I’m used to. On the way back to the firm I ruminated on my discomfort, and my lunch. I thought about Every Hand Revealed and my tangy, salty, crunchy, bitter, batter-fried onions. So good I wish I had more RIGHT NOW!

You have to adjust for the wry Scandinavian-ness of the book (“My objective today is to avoid any dastardly Finns!”, “Uh oh, it looks like we’re in Swedish territory!”), but The Great Dane mentions at least once that a particular card in a particular situation tastes bad. I wonder: Synaesthesic poker decisions, perhaps?

Every poker player has a couple of wild ideas. Doyle Brunson’s original Super System contains a chapter on why he thinks ESP exists based on decades of him reading his opponents’ minds. Barry Greenstein’s fabulous Ace on the River has a chapter about how all high-powered people — sports stars, politicians, business people, etc — need a regular supply of extramarital sex to keep on top of their games, poker included.

My crazy poker theory is much less inflammatory, for once. I think that it’s possible for our incredibly powerful pattern-matching brains to pick up shuffling algorithms, particularly live. This could be why a card “tastes bad” — the right brain is banging on the senses saying, “danger, poker Robinson, danger!”

Alright, that’s it for lunch hour. Back to the Accounting mines. I’m up to the interior to be burned alive for Spacekat’s wedding for the next five or six days. I doubt I’ll have my computer with, so: Hiatus! I’ll see if I can get some pics of one of these 2,000ha superfires that’re roasting away in the backcountry.

And when the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven about the space of half an hour… And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.