Critical Exponent

From The New York Times, an article on how society is slowly learning to support gender-variant children:

[A]s advocates gain ground for what they call gender-identity rights, evidenced most recently by New York City’s decision to let people alter the sex listed on their birth certificates, a major change is taking place among schools and families. Children as young as 5 who display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals.

Doctors, some of them from the top pediatric hospitals, have begun to advise families to let these children be “who they are” to foster a sense of security and self-esteem. They are motivated, in part, by the high incidence of depression, suicidal feelings and self-mutilation that has been common in past generations of transgender children. Legal trends suggest that schools are now required to respect parents’ decisions.

International feuds explained.

Middle East quarrels clarified.

Sex is fun, but as we all know, it has potential consequences: it can give rise to strong emotions, expose one to STDs, and (for straight folks) carry the possibility of an unintended pregnancy. For this reason, there is general agreement that people are socially and economically better off holding off on sex until adulthood. Even the modern adult, however, is hardly constrained by older notions of “procreative sex only, and only in marriage.” Some choose to hold off on marriage until reaching a more secure and stable point in their lives. Others do not wish to get married, or are not allowed to. Even a married straight couple may choose to limit how many children they have. This does not change the fact that most adults are sexual creatures, and sex can be extremely gratifying.

Which brings us to the Sex Wars. Many conservatives want to establish abstinence-only sex education, reasoning that it will cut down on pre-marital sex and the myriad social problems they claim it brings about: the decay of morals, rampant hedonism, and teenage pregnancy. Many conservatives also want to restrict or criminalize abortion, in part because they see it as breaking the link between sex and procreation. For this reason, too, many conservatives are waging a war on contraception, so that every sexual act (remember, only the straight missionary position is allowed) may lead to pregnancy and the growth of the family.

These solutions put the cart before the horse. Sure, youngsters should wait to have sex, but human nature hasn’t changed in millenia: just as they did in Biblical, medieval, and Victorian times, some fraction of young people will have sex (sometimes covertly, sometimes with a wink from society). Admonitions to abstain have not worked in all that time, and they don’t work now. Given that fact, what is the best we can do? Surely it is to educate people so that the undesirable consequences are reduced as much as possible! This means comprehensive sex education, including information on contraceptives and their risks and benefits. Withholding this information, knowing human nature as we do, is tantamount to cruelly keeping our children ignorant and condemning them to carry the burden of their uninformed, if less than wise, choices.

A similar reasoning applies to abortion. Getting an abortion is no walk in the park, and I doubt many women rely on it as a means of birth control. More to the point, women have abortions even when abortions are criminalized: the rich do it with the discretion that only money can buy, while the poor do it in back alleys. Criminalizing abortion will not stop it, but will drive it underground. The results, at least for the poor, will be a higher rate of health complications and deaths, as well as the additional stigma, vulnerability to extortion, and criminal record that can dash all aspirations of building a better life.

If the conservatives really care about making lives better and not having abortions, they should make it possible for people to be informed about sex, prophylactics, and birth control, so that those who invariably can’t or do not want to live up to conservatives’ moral codes can make informed decisions. In other words, given that some people will choose to have sex in situations that put them at risk of STDs or unwanted pregnancies, our social policy should be to help them and society minimize those risks and associated costs. For this reason, the third front in the sex wars is also important: access to contraceptives must be guaranteed. This way, we can help reduce disease and unwanted pregnancy before they happen, when it’s cheaper and safer.

What seems to drive many of the conservatives in the Sex Wars is the notion that sex and reproduction ought to always remain coupled. That is a moral judgment to which they are entitled, but which should not be forced on the rest of society. I submit for their consideration a different tenet which works for other people: when done in a way that is respectful of all parties and which prevents unwanted consequences, sex is not only harmless, it is a celebration of life.

I just ran across an old yet interesting New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell on choking versus panicking. In short, choking is the “loss of instinct”– the instinctual responses that come with experience (muscle memory, skill, what have you)– in favor of the explicit, deliberate thinking that novices have. Panicking is the “reversion to instinct”–the most primordial survival instincts that block both experienced skill and novice deliberation.

Daniel Gilbert of Harvard writes in The New York Times about how we humans cannot help but be affected by biases.

In short, doctors, judges, consultants and vice presidents strive for truth more often than we realize, and miss that mark more often than they realize. Because the brain cannot see itself fooling itself, the only reliable method for avoiding bias is to avoid the situations that produce it.

A New York Times article reports that children, unlike chimps, seem to overimitate others even when it is clear the actions are irrelevant to the goal at hand. To me, such overimitation sounds a lot like ritual.

I often wonder whether there is an innately human predisposition towards gullibility and ritual. One can think of a simple evolutionary advantage to gullibility: a group whose members are not constantly questioning each other is much more likely to be cohesive and survive (likewise, a group where no one ever questions each other is likely to always blindly follow and perish). The scientists in this study similarly speculate that overimitation may have enabled our tool-making forebears to spread their technological prowess; perhaps (this is me talking) a side effect of this was the human predisposition for rituals.

Speculating on the evolutionary advantages of various human behaviors is dangerous, since it seems that we can invent a rationale for any behavior we want as well as for its opposite. Nevertheless, when I see all the rituals in the social world around me diverting energy from helping society, when I see people blindly following leaders based on emotional responses rather than on the merits of their ideas, I cannot help but wonder whether this presumptive former evolutionary advantage isn’t now maladaptively overshadowing the equally-human rationality that is so critically needed in contemporary society.