Idea: The 7^th of October massacre is grim evidence of the failure of Palestinian society to progress. It’s evidence of the failure of Palestinians to control men within their society who have extreme personalities and are only concerned with their selfish desires. If the West doesn’t recognise this failure and understand that support for Israel is necessary for peace, this will be evidence of the regression of Western society.  

When I was thinking about the Israel-Hamas conflict there seemed two options for an initial post. The first was to explore what was the most realistic solution to minimise harm, even if this wasn’t especially realistic. And then assuming there wouldn’t be such a planned response, what was the likely outcome for the conflict given it would just be a process of action and reaction from the various players. This post explores the latter. 

I’ll begin with a question. After 76 years since the founding of Israel, is the 7^th of October massacre the best Palestinian society could manage in response? The deliberate killing of civilians, whole families, children, the rape and torture? Allowing hospitals, schools, homes to be used as military bases? Allowing themselves to be used as human shields and disposable political fodder? 

What standard, though, is there to compare against? The irony is that Israel itself can act as the standard. We’re meant to believe the creation of Israel was so traumatic for Palestinians they’ve never recovered, when Israel is born from the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. We’re meant to believe Israel only exists because of America, when there are dozens of Arab countries and nearly 2 billion Muslims. We’re meant to believe that Israelis and Palestinians could never have found peace over the 76 years since Israel’s founding, when the country that started WWII, Germany, now has open borders with its neighbours. 

No. The 7^th of October massacre is an example of social and human failure; it’s an example of a failure to progress. This failure has been there since the beginning. It’s the reason Arab countries and the Palestinians were too weak to prevent the formation of Israel. It’s the reason Jewish refugees couldn’t find sanctuary in what is now Israel following the Holocaust. It’s the reason nearly a million Jews left or were forced to leave Arab countries following the creation of Israel. 

Why have Israelis progressed versus their opponents? One of the major themes for this blog is to highlight the role of intelligence in determining human outcomes. I’ve also suggested our understanding of human behaviour will eventually become focused at the level of the individual rather than social or political theories. I’ll integrate these two perspectives. 

Israel is a high tech, pro-science society whose military power depends on these features. There isn’t space in this blog post to discuss the way values and culture shape shared knowledge in a community and therefore how intelligently it deals with problems, but this can be intuitively measured by intellectual output. A simple way to do this would be to take note of the vast difference in Nobel prizes, for example, won by people of Jewish heritage vs Arab/Muslim. Israel has inherited this intellectual culture from its Jewish founders, and it is an essential source of its strength. 

So, Israel has inherited the Jewish culture for education and knowledge, but there are also social factors it has in common with other Westernised countries. There are many examples I could discuss but I'll focus on one that’s directly relevant to this conflict. Israeli society is better than its opponents at controlling extreme elements within it. 

I’ll illustrate this idea by asking a question whose answer highlights for me how low quality our discussions are about social problems. Who was directly responsible for the October the 7^th massacre? It was almost exclusively men. The same as nearly every conflict. Yet, this obvious fact isn’t even noticed. 

By pointing this out I’m not invoking politicised pop psychology terms such as toxic masculinity. I’m calling upon a central theme of this blog, which is that I believe we know enough about the brain and mind that we should integrate it into our discussions. That is, we know enough to know what the content should be, even if the details are still to be fully determined. I’ll illustrate. 

It is highly likely there are sex-based differences in innate behaviour. In this case, the propensity to resolve social conflict using physical violence, with men being more likely to use violence. However, as can be illustrated by the level of violence in advanced societies, this is only a latent potential. Whatever the exposure to social conflict, there will be individual-level and innate factors, for example to do with mental health and personality. And then at the social and again individual-level this will be overlayed by cultural factors, for example gender socialisation. 

To put these various factors together more concretely, it’s possible a male child could be born with innate mental health problems or a propensity for personality traits such as psychopathy. As they grow, they could be socialised into a gender role that reinforces their personality traits or amplifies their mental health problems. Mixed with an innate potential to resolve social conflict with violence – and with unstable and extreme emotional states – you’re guaranteed to produce someone who feels only hate and a desire for violence. 

Advanced societies at the very least control these people, while modern societies are less likely to provoke their latent potential for extreme behaviour. It should be obvious to any intelligent person the behaviour of Hamas members on October the 7^th was completely irrational if the claim is it was intended to benefit Palestinians. The whole of Palestinian society, both men and women, failed to control these extreme elements in their society and are now suffering the consequences. 

The intelligence to create a high-tech, materially successful economy mixed with an ability to exclude irrational, selfish, and emotionally unstable people from important social roles converges in the military strength of the Israel Defense Forces. Its brutal response to the 7^th of October massacre is the starkest evidence of the difference between Israel and its enemies. 

At the top of this post, I said I wanted to discuss what the likely outcome of the Gaza-Israel conflict would be, and the argument I’ve made above is the 7^th of October massacre is evidence of nothing more than human failure. So, this is what I see as the outcome for the conflict. Whether it’s one year, ten years, or one hundred, everyone will agree that the massacre was an example of social failure. And the social progress required for this consensus will lead to peaceful relations between whoever holds this view.  

People in 100 years will also think many others failed, particularly in the West. As I argued in Know Your Israeli, many countries have good reason to share some responsibility for the conflict in Gaza, so they should have worked to create peace. Another reason why people in the future might consider the West failed is if doesn’t adequately support Israel. The reason is because support for Israel is much more likely to lead to peace than not supporting it. I’ll explain by posing a final question. 

Imagine that on the 6^th of October gay couples in Gaza were living openly together, as they can in Israel. Now what do you consider as more likely: on the 7^th of October 1000s of men would cross the border from Gaza into Israel to rape, torture and murder; or, a diversity of people would be crossing an open border for work and leisure?  

It’s clear to me the people who would choose the latter option understand how peace could be achieved between Israelis and Palestinians. Such people understand what human progress is and how values and knowledge make it possible. Israelis have socially progressed more than Palestinians, and so are closer to finding peace with Palestinians and Israel’s neighbours than those groups are with Israel. This is why the West should support Israel. But there is another reason. 

There is political instability in the West. The West is failing to control extreme elements in its own society, whether it’s from home-grown extremes across the political spectrum or religious fundamentalism in immigrant populations. Although not unconditional, support for Israel reflects how developed the West is socially, and therefore how likely it is to control its own extremism. If doesn’t, like the Palestinians, it’ll live with the consequences. 

I have so much more I’d like to say but this post is long enough. I’d therefore welcome comments so these thoughts and ideas can be linked to this post in the replies but without making it too long! 

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Idea: people experience self-awareness when they notice the coincidence between self-directed actions and the sensory input caused by those actions. This requires time for activated neural networks to be connected. Due to how information is stored in the brain, these moments of self-awareness may be experienced as negative and be avoided, which could then prevent people from benefitting from the insight self-awareness allows. 

I’ve outlined how I think our intelligence is generated in the post ‘Intelligence, A Simple Mechanism’. However, the idea in that post came to me when I was thinking about self-awareness or consciousness. I had the idea when thinking about the mirror test. 

Almost all animals will instantly react as if they are looking at another animal when seeing their reflection in a mirror. Those that don’t, like our closest cousins the great apes, won’t react so rapidly and will show signs of self-awareness such as touching their face while looking at themselves. This self-awareness will require at least two things: a physical process occurring as part of the biology of the brain, and the feeling that’s associated with this physical event. This blog post will examine the former. 

Neurons are connected up into networks. Some networks will control movement, some the visual system that allows you to see movement, and some will process other senses such as touch that will result from movement. In the example given above, some networks will direct a hand to touch your face, your eyes will see the hand moving, and you will feel the touch on your face. 

All these networks are in their own areas of the brain and are separated from each other. At a basic physical level, it will take time for these networks to connect with each other across the distance between these discrete areas. Something occurred to me when considering this time-lag that’s required for neural networks to be connected: what do we feel when this process is occurring. 

Based on how I assumed neural networks are formed, it seemed to me we would have a core of information we feel certain about that’s bounded by low certainty information (ie, what we’ve learnt vs what we may understand), and any period of focused thought would involve branching of activity within and between these networks of information. In fact, the output for any instance of cognition would be impacted by how well these networks were connected and integrated into a representation of the external world that may be useful. 

But, if an instance of self-awareness takes time to connect the networks controlling acting and sensing, what would it feel like if branching across these networks activated low certainty information? Information that might result in chaotic activity or dead ends? Intuitively, it seemed to me this would be experienced as negative, under the assumption that what we feel is distributed amongst the neurons that are activate at any one time. 

This possible insight was remarkable to me. It immediately suggested how thinking and feeling could be different sides of the same basic process, and it was also immediately apparent that this process could be not just a general feature for how the brain works but the basic underlying mechanism. This blog will explore this idea and its explanatory power, so I won’t expand any further here – see Intelligence, A Simple Mechanism for some more detail. 

For this short post, I’ll just discuss one other aspect. The prediction is self-awareness may necessarily involve being exposed to negative feelings, especially as more time elapses while considering the self. These negative feelings could be inhibitory. But self-awareness may be a rich source of information, which ultimately would be beneficial. So, the pause for thought required for self-awareness may also require courage. 

These emotions – the negative feelings due to the uncertain information, feelings of courage to overcome these negative feels, the feeling of self-awareness itself – are explained at the level of a physical mechanism in the post Intelligence, A Simple Mechanism, but not how the qualitative experience, the feelings themselves, associated with this process emerge. I’ve spent a long time thinking about this problem, sometimes called the Hard Problem of consciousness. I’m not sure it’s been very productive(!), but I’ll write about my thoughts on this topic in other posts.

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Idea: dehumanising someone prevents you from understanding their behaviour. This dynamic has been prominent in people’s reaction to Israel’s response to the 7^th of October massacre. As Israel is by far the stronger combatant in the Gaza war, people would prioritise understanding the behaviour of Israel if they genuinely wanted to help Palestinians. This therefore also reveals a lack of compassion for Palestinians. 

I’ve thought a lot about the Israel-Gaza conflict since the 7^th of October massacre. This post explores the response from people outside the conflict. 

I need a moral position around which to frame this argument, and I’ll begin by describing some images I've seen from the conflict that have influenced this position. I saw a dead Israeli baby, face blurred, but its body covered in blood. I saw a horribly burnt and screaming Palestinian child being carried into a hospital. In the rooms of Israeli children, I saw walls covered with bullet holes and blood. I saw a Palestinian toddler sitting on a hospital bed trembling with shock. 

We can argue about the degree to which adults contribute to their own suffering during a conflict, but it’s clear to me children don’t. The moral position this post will be built around then will be that people should be focused, at the very least, on reducing the death and suffering of children. 

With this moral position, it seems to me the task becomes identifying what the limits are to achieve this goal. I won’t be discussing the morality of these limits, just whether they exist or not. In fact, this is an essential element of how I’m going to frame the response of people outside the conflict. That is, if you’re truly focused on a particular goal, you will identify and accept certain limits even if you don't like them. 

The first and most obvious limit is the military strength of Israel vs the Palestinians and the neighbouring countries. From the beginning of the conflict, it was unlikely countries neighbouring Israel would want to get involved, and Western countries immediately gave support to Israel’s military action. 

For people concerned about Gazan civilians, the goal should then have been focused on trying to prevent Israel’s military action under whatever limits are relevant. Before I detail what I think these limits are, I think it’ll be useful to outline my solution and I’ll begin by appealing to your intuition about a more familiar situation. 

Faced with a violent person, people in organised societies can call the police. This option has an essential civilising effect. Without it, people could have no choice but to use violence themselves in a chaotic and emotional driven way which might escalate to involve others. Handing this violence, effectively, over to the state has the potential to minimise it and avoid these problems, especially in societies with democratic oversight.  

Using this idea of a civilising ‘police force’, this is how I think countries outside the conflict should have responded to the attack by Hamas. Due to historical involvement, many countries should have accepted some responsibility for managing the situation. A UN sponsored force should have occupied Gaza with the aim to provide security for Israel and retrieve its hostages while removing the military capability of Hamas. The UN should then have administered Gaza with the aim to deradicalise Gazan society and steer the Palestinians towards accepting a two-state solution. Other than returning the hostages, the time to achieve these goals should have been at a pace that minimised the loss of civilian life, especially children. 

There isn’t the space in this post to fully deal with how realistic this solution is. However, I’ll contrast it below with the most frequent demand heard by ‘pro-Palestinian’ people, a ceasefire. Also, multiple countries might eventually be drawn into a wider war anyway, and my solution could prevent that escalation.  

Back to this post, I’d imagine many who claim to be pro-Palestinian wouldn’t like some of the aims in my solution. This leads me onto the additional limits I see as relevant to this situation and why they’re not recognised and accepted. These limits are to be found by understanding how Israelis reacted to the massacre. 

On the 7^th of October, Hamas killed, raped, and tortured Israelis of all ages and sexes. It seems obvious to me Israelis felt fear and anger, and a strong sense of urgency to resolve these intense, negative emotions. There was a sense of unity as well as isolation. They’ve been trapped in that moment since it happened, and this isolating emotional state has reduced their ability to consider Palestinian civilians. 

These are the limits I see as following from understanding the reaction of Israelis to the massacre. Israelis felt an urgent need to immediately remove an existential threat. After 75 years of contested statehood and the savagery of the massacre, Israelis had no belief in a political solution. Destroying the military capability of Hamas could be achieved in months; the timeline for changing minds was unknown. Because of the brutality displayed by Hamas, Israel’s hostages needed to be put out of their misery as much as saved. The demands of Hamas were suicidal for the state of Israel. Israel had no choice but to remove the military capability of Hamas, and nobody was going to directly help them do this. They either had Israel and each other or they had nothing. 

To emphasise, the only objections I see as relevant to the argument I’m making is whether the limits I've just described exist or don’t exist. The morality you give them is irrelevant. You can’t ignore Israel’s emotional response to the massacre and expect to prevent harm to Palestinians. You can only prevent a military response from Israel by accepting their limits. 

So, if what I’ve suggested is true, why have so many people on the pro-Palestinian side not understood and accepted the emotional reality of the conflict? That is, not appreciated they must have a realistic solution to the emotional state of Israelis if they want to prevent military action by Israel. 

I think many on the pro-Palestinian side have dehumanised Israelis. For this post, the aspect of dehumanisation I consider important is where it reduces the information people have about those they’ve dehumanised. Social cognition begins with Theory of Mind before it progresses to feelings of empathy and compassion. That is, using awareness of our own and others minds we can predict what other people may be thinking and feeling in various situations. This begins just as knowledge or information before it may progress to emotions such as empathy. Pro-Palestinian people have therefore inhibited their ability to understand Israelis when they’ve dehumanised them. 

There could be many reasons for this dehumanisation but I’m going to focus on one that made me wonder if there’s an irony at the heart of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. As I’ve detailed in other posts, our minds are made up of networks of connected neurons. When one network is activated, it increases the chances linked networks will also be activated. So, when people’s Theory of Mind is engaged, not only will they be able understand someone’s behaviour in an abstract way they may also automatically experience feelings of empathy and compassion, as these emotions naturally follow from understanding their behaviour. 

I suspect this is one of the reasons pro-Palestinian people have dehumanised Israelis. They would rather not feel any empathy and compassion for them and so they block the process of social cognition by dehumanising them. This then prevents them from thinking intelligently about Israel’s behaviour.  

However, neither Israelis nor Palestinians can afford this luxury. Not understanding each other has, is, and will continue to increase the amount of death and suffering each side experience. Israelis and Palestinians are forced to ‘know your enemy’, and so there will always be the chance they may experience empathy and compassion. The long-term solution to their conflict may only be with each other.  

I see little evidence a solution can be found from those outside the war. After 4 months of conflict, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians are dead, a third of them children. Gaza is destroyed, which will lead to many more people dying and suffering from disease and social breakdown. As I write this, Israeli forces are preparing to attack Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians have fled to from the rest of Gaza. 

The pro-Palestinian side have done nothing to prevent this. Western cities have seen marches with banners and chants that are the opposite of what is needed to prevent Israel from attacking Gaza. The most common demand is for an unconditional cessation of military activity by Israel. Hamas have publicly stated they wish to repeat the barbarity of the 7^th of October massacre. Calling for a ceasefire is effectively saying you think the life of an Israeli is worth less than a Palestinian. Unsurprisingly, Israelis aren’t listening. 

This is what my solution above is competing against. Any solution requires a consensus that includes Israel, countries that support it, and countries that don’t support Hamas and/or terrorism. An unconditional ceasefire can’t achieve this, so my solution is at least more realistic than the demand for a ceasefire.  

When trying to understand someone’s behaviour, I think people effectively ask: what’s motivating them, and how intelligently are they pursuing their goals? The military strength of Israel is obvious; their emotional response to the massacre is obvious; the limits that follow from understanding this response also seem obvious to me. If understanding the immediate emotional and practical context of Israel’s response to the 7^th of October massacre is straightforward, then it’s not a problem with intelligence that has led to the demands of pro-Palestinian people. I think it’s their motivations that are the problem. They’re not genuinely focused on preventing the death and suffering of Gazan civilians. 

I don’t know what these motivations are. All I do know is that Israelis and Palestinians need to understand each other better, first more intelligently to save themselves, then hopefully with empathy and compassion to save each other. They can’t depend on anyone else to do this. In particular, Palestinians can’t depend on their supporters in the West to put their interests, and their children, first.

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I’m struggling to write posts and it’s due to how I view intelligence. I’ve already written some posts related to this topic (see here, here, and here), but I think I’ll find it easier if there’s a single post I can reference when I feel I'm invoking an idiosyncratic view of intelligence. To explain the idea for this post, I’ll first outline some properties I think an idea about intelligence should have: 

1. It should be simple. My background is in cellular and molecular neuroscience, and I have a bias there isn’t enough information in our genes to directly code for our behaviour in any meaningful sense. Also, the history of science shows that nature creates complexity via simple mechanisms. One of the best examples is the Theory of Evolution, which rationalises how the complexity of biology could emerge; it doesn’t directly explain the details. 

2. It should be universal. The Theory of Evolution rationalises the complexity of biology across time and place – from microorganism to us, millions of years ago until now. An equivalent idea for intelligence should have this property for its scope of influence. That is, any intelligent or intelligent-like behaviour (hence just intelligence) should be derived from the same mechanism – whether it’s in insects or humans, across time; and specified to us, both social and abstract cognition. 

3. It should be consistent with established science. Over time, established fields of science have been found to share concepts and theories. For example, laws and theories about thermodynamics. The brain is a physical system; it seems to me we should assume how it functions involves what’s already been observed for the rest of nature. 

4. Feelings of any kind (eg, emotions, motivations, consciousness) are functionally important. Feelings motivate us so if they are to be functional, they must be intelligent. That is, they should motivate us to act in a way that reflects knowledge of the world that is useful. 

I’ll now outline the idea, which is illustrated by the figure below: 

Information and correlations between information (hence just information) is stored in the brain in networks of connected neurons. At any one time, we will have a core of information we feel certain about (illustrated by the green colour in the figure above) that is bounded by information that becomes increasingly uncertain. As activity spreads through these networks (illustrated by the time arrow) two features should emerge. Firstly, more networks and the information they represent will be connected, which may improve cognitive output. Secondly, the probably of uncertain information being activated will be increased. This may lead to novel connections, but it will also be experienced as negative and therefore inhibit further cognition. In other words, cognition involves a time-lag between the initiation of an instance of thought and its completion where novel insights may emerge but this will be experienced as negative; and in fact, its completion may be driven by the negative experience rather than a functional conclusion. Equally, though, the negative experience has a functional role in signalling there is insufficient understanding. Therefore, there is a subtle relationship between thinking and feeling.  

Properties of the idea: 

1. The time-lag between the initiation of a thought and its termination creates the opportunity for original connections between information; this is due to the branching within and between networks of connected neurons – more time, more branching, more novelty. There is therefore the potential for an evolutionary process to occur where new ideas can be tested and persist if they’re useful.  

2. To make our way through the world productively, we must process and integrate large amounts of diverse information (social, physical, abstract, etc). The idea in this post suggests this information is reduced to a binary output, positive or negative affect. The negative affect emerges as we concentrate on something, and my current thinking is the positive affect is experienced when we find a way to reduce the uncertainty we’ve revealed during this period of focused thought. We can then act on these feelings without necessarily being conscious of every detail that’s generated it. Reducing cognitive output to a binary go/no-go signal massively simplifies thinking and behaviour. These signals are our emotions, motivations, and conscious perceptions. 

3. The figure above assumes that networks that represent high certainty information feedback on each other. However, as more time elapses and branching into networks finds less certain connections the probability the activity will feedback is reduced. In fact, the activity may just terminate in a chaotic mix of dead ends. This would be an inefficient use of the brain’s energy, and like all physical systems it’s reasonable to assume the brain is organised to be energy efficient. The negative affect created by the activation of uncertain information therefore signals energy is being used inefficiently.  

4. The idea presented in the figure above suggests there are two ways cognition can generate functional outcomes, determined by the type of branching into neural networks: it may be constrained, and only relatively certain information is activated; or there may be more activation of uncertain information. There are various systems in the brain that may regulate this. For this post, I'll illustrate these two aspects of cognition using everyday examples. So, when more certain information is activated this would be experienced as conscious, procedural, and finite; in contrast, if more uncertain information is activated it would be more intuitive, creative, and not as easily resolved. The latter could also result in unpleasant emotional states due to the uncertain information that’s been activated to give access to novel connections. This would therefore explain why creativity and strong emotions, even mental health issues, are often linked. 

5. The idea in this post could be framed purely in terms of energy use. So, rather than the negative experience generated by uncertain information being the motivating force, it’s the inefficient use of energy the uncertain information causes that drives behaviour, and the negative experience is just an epiphenomenon. I’ll discuss this in other posts. Although I do think the emotional component is important, it’s derived from physical events, such as energy use, in the brain. 

People have tried to define intelligence in various ways, see here. I find these definitions unsatisfactory, so I'll suggest my own: 

Using a subtle relationship between how the certainty and uncertainty associated with information is physically represented in the brain, intelligence is the conversion of a basic set of needs into discrete and context-specific emotions, motivations, and conscious perceptions. These are used as binary go/no-go signals to direct action to satisfy these basic needs. 

This definition captures the essential idea within this post that intelligence is about the refinement of a basic set of biological needs, and this process is grounded in the brain as a physical system.  

I want to keep this post short; I'll be exploring it further many times. But there is one last thing I think is important. Artificial intelligence, AI, has recently been prominent in the news. Although superficially impressive, AI systems such as ChatGPT just use basic statistics and brute computational power to regurgitate information already generated by us. In a sense, they’re just doing one component of what the brain does. Recognising and storing information and the correlations between information. But AI has no self-motivation. 

The idea in this post has a simple explanation for motivation. We have evolved basic needs, such as for food and sex, etc. The brain will activate networks that contain information related to these needs and continue activating them until the need is satisfied. This chronic activation will gradually include uncertain information, and this will have two effects: it may suggest novel ways to achieve the goal, but there will also be the motivation to reduce exposure to the uncertain information, which will be experienced as negative. 

I don’t see any reason why this basic framework couldn’t be applied to AI systems. But here’s the problem. This post suggests that intelligence involves the refinement and repackaging of basic needs into many individual context-specific motivations. However, it’s difficult to predict what these will be. They are only limited by the context and level of intelligence. 

Humans may have built civilisations using this process. And destroyed many on the way. If the idea in this post is true, applying it to AI systems would be dangerous. It would be difficult to predict what new motivations the AI system would create to satisfy whatever basic needs it’s been given. I suspect this property will be true of any idea that allows true intelligence to be created, so for this reason I think AI systems built using such ideas should be restricted. 

There’s much that remains undefined in this post, but I have to start somewhere. I’ll be returning to this idea both directly and indirectly in other posts, which I'll hopefully now find easier to write.

Idea: Some debates may have plateaued due to people not understanding statistical concepts. Policy makers will need to incorporate this insight into their decision making so that resources aren’t wasted and the resolution to social problems can still progress. 

In the UK, there have been a number of cases of police officers committing sex-based crimes. One that emerged recently reminded me of an idea I had while thinking about the killing of black men by US policeman. Mainstream discussions about these topics almost never consider base rates so they’re inherently unproductive.

Poor use of base rates is so common it’s been elevated to a cognitive bias, the base rate fallacy. Using the examples above, what is the rate of sex-based crimes in the general population? Is it higher or lower in the police? Or, if you control for the number of police interactions between ethnicities in the US is the rate of killing different? In this post, I’m not interested in discussing individual cases which will have their own merits. I’ll just highlight three points: how little base rates are incorporated into our discussions, that some debates may have plateaued due to people not understanding base rates and other statistical concepts, and what this means for solving social problems. 

As a scientist, I’m used to considering base rates, but it can be difficult to dismiss your intuition using statistics. In fact, I've given the feeling this generates a name, data jà vu. This is the weird contradictory feeling you often get as a scientist when your intuition says one thing but your data is telling you something else. You have to overcome this feeling, though. There are formal, reliable ways to analyse data which can prevent you from being fooled by your intuition. In many debates, though, statistical concepts like base rates aren’t even mentioned. It’s as if they don’t exist. 

I think debates about some social problems have effectively plateaued due to people relying on their intuition rather than statistics. I don’t know what the base rate of criminality is in the general population versus the police. Do you? If neither of us know, then the debate about how to reduce criminality in the police is effectively over for us. I accept this, and know if I want a serious opinion I’ll have to improve my knowledge. However, what I see other people do is rely on their intuitions and just settle on an explanation and solution that fits some world view, often involving a belief there are structural problems related to people’s identities.  

As I say, I don’t know what the rates of criminality are in the population versus police, but for the sake of argument let’s say the base rate is the same. This would rule out any structural problems, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept criminality in the police. You just need to find the real explanation and an associated solution. I’ll illustrate by speculating what might drive criminality in the police. 

The majority of criminal violence is committed by men, but only a tiny percentage of men commit these crimes. Many of these men will be psychopaths. That is, they will have a discrete and stable personality type that can be recognised. Psychopathy is an interesting topic that I’ll leave for another post, but it’s heritable (ie, has some inherited biological component), can be promoted by childhood trauma, and will reveal itself throughout someone’s behaviour. In other words, psychopaths and their lives are atypical, and they can be identified. Crucially, psychopathic men exist throughout society. It seems reasonable then the police should just assume some of their officers will be psychopaths and have measures in place to identify them. You’d imagine of all organisations the police should be able to do this, no? 

What if, then, criminality in the police is more to do with the base rate of psychopathy in the population than, for example, structural problems within the culture of the police? And, what if there are people that have neither the time, motivation, or intelligence to understand why it’s the former and not the latter? Are we just going to accept some debates will go round in circles forever because of these people? 

As I've said before, when science reaches a certain level of understanding it sets the standard for what’s considered acceptable to discuss or not. In relation to this post, I’m suggesting we will reach a point, and we may already be there, where policy makers understand some people can’t productively contribute to certain debates because their understanding isn’t progressing beyond a certain point. Governments will have to be open about this problem so their policies aren’t influenced by erroneous political pressure. Otherwise, progress on social problems may stagnate.

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The song, called Oceans, originates from a Christian worship collective called Hillsong UNITED. The song is about stepping into the unknown and the first line of the chorus is a plea for God to lead the singer through an uncertain world in a way that creates trust in this ‘Spirit’. I’ve never been religious, but I've always felt a connection to religious people. They take seriously questions that naturally form in the minds of conscious, thinking people, such as: Why are we here? How did we get here? How do you live a good life? They also feel wonder at existence. I can relate to this way of being, and I found the song and the first line of the chorus compelling because I would also like to believe in something that helps me live in a way that gives meaning to my life.  

For the religious, these questions and feelings have been answered by a God via religious texts. However, I think science has and will reveal all we are able to know. But rather than calling upon a Spirit to guide you through an uncertain world, science reduces that uncertainty through ever more detailed observation. When I first heard Oceans, I felt challenged to replace the first line of the chorus with something that felt right to me as a scientist, and if science accepts the doubt we should feel when faced with an uncertain world then why not, ‘Doubt lead me where my trust is without borders’? But I found this didn’t work. The original line of Oceans’ chorus isn’t a cold, technical instruction for how to live in an uncertain world, as my suggested replacement seemed to me. It’s a plea for something to help you through this uncertainty.  

We imagine we make purely rational decisions but there will inevitably come a point where we reach the limit of what we know and understand. The point where all that’s left is doubt, and where we can only reduce that uncertainty via action. What leads us to make a final step? I think it’s courage. Whether it’s everyday actions where you’re barely aware you’re being courageous or major life decisions where it’s obvious, I would say we only really progress as thinking, feeling beings when we live courageously. And anyone who has tested their courage will develop trust in it, I think. 

So, I found myself in an ironic position. When I set out to challenge the first line of Oceans’ chorus, I imagined I would claim that knowledge and reason makes trust in God redundant. And although I think this is true those things require something science hasn’t yet explained and may never explain. It’s not overblown to say courage is required to extend knowledge. We’re lucky to live in a time and place where we can access knowledge accumulated over 1000s of years and forget how much struggle and suffering went into that knowledge being accepted. And what about things that science hasn’t explained yet? The most obvious being love. You can never know how much someone will love you until you love them first, and often this requires courage. 

So, courage lead me where my trust is without borders. This is my resolution to the contradictory feelings I had when I first heard the song Oceans. While researching this song I found another video of it being sung live where the audience sings the chorus with the singer, Taya Smith. It must be a wonderful feeling to share what feels like a resolution to something so fundamental to what it is to be human. I can't see myself doing anything similar any time soon. Not that there aren’t people who I imagine feel the same, but I think there’s less of us and they’re not easy to find in my experience. A religious resolution to life’s big questions is easier, I’d say, than the patient application of doubt and courage. 

I was going to end this post by saying I suspect I’ll have to continue searching for answers to questions I find interesting mostly on my own. But then it occurred to me that this will be read by people who’ve chosen to subscribe to this blog. Have I revealed enough of myself in my posts so far to find some kindred spirits, I wondered? The one subscriber I know personally has certainly lived her life courageously. And then there are others that through their words and actions I can believe understand the value of courage to an authentic and meaningful life. Maybe it would be nice to meet some of you some day, although for that to happen I’d have to be courageous enough to say who I am.  

Idea: Modern liberal democracies allow society’s natural managers to pursue their niche interests, which has created a structural problem with political representation. Until this is resolved, state managed rights and responsibilities will stagnant and regress. 

Gender ideology wants to re-establish gender stereotypes that harm women and girls, put males into women’s prisons, and make women’s sport redundant. I’m sure given enough time wider society will understand the harm this ideology is doing, but why should women have to wait for this? This is where the importance of political representation by people directly affected by an issue becomes relevant. Simply, political representation shortens the time to resolve political disputes. 

The question is who are the women best suited to represent the political interests of women as a whole? I’ve highlighted the small number of women who are successfully challenging gender ideology, but they represent a tiny minority of the women who could challenge it. I’ve also suggested that political activism has been taken over by a ‘B team’ of average people now that the smartest people from previously disadvantaged groups are free to pursue their niche interests. It’s this latter group of ‘smartest people’ that I think represent the majority of women that are required to become more politically involved. But who are they? 

Firstly, this perception is just a means to illustrate some ideas; it’s not the only place where you can find smart women! I’ve worked in both the academic and commercial world, and for me the smartest women are more often found in the business world. You can succeed in academia if you achieve certain endpoints (generally your publication record) and this is heavily dependent on factors such as memory, being comfortable with abstract complexity, your work ethic, etc. In contrast, the business world requires a much broader skill set, especially in the social and emotional sphere. In my experience excellent managers, for example, are as good at productively resolving the petty melodramas that often plague workplaces as they are at the technical aspects the workplace is meant to be focused on. 

The business world is full of these smart women, and I think these are the women that are required to be more politically engaged. But how? I think a new movement is required. We’ve had first- and second-wave feminism followed by the incoherent and harmful mess of third wave feminism created by B team activists. Maybe now if women from the business world and beyond are to have some influence we might call it fourth quarter feminism. 

What would be the characteristics of this movement? It will be led by smart people so I think it’ll be naturally orientated towards liberation feminism over equality feminism, although I doubt the members of this movement will be interested in labels. I’ve mentioned liberation feminism before and its relationship to intelligence. As I'll discuss in other posts, I think liberation feminism, and in reality the deeper and broader truth it’s derived from, is more cognitively demanding than the simple, conservative position of believing the status quo should be equally divided, so smart people are more likely to prefer it. 

It's obvious to ask, “so what will this involve then?”. Well, to quote Germaine Greer in the link above, “I don’t know”. This reveals that people have to accept this movement will involve a process of discovery, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some features that will be common along this path. 

For example, there will be an open recognition amongst non-activist, ordinary women there’s a structural problem with their political representation in modern societies. And despite wanting to just live their lives, they will have to have some degree of political involvement. I imagine that engagement will need some unifying identifier like ‘The Conversation’ or similar. And this conversation will be just an everyday activity that has the essential feature of recognising that action will be regularly required to deal with the structural problem mentioned above. 

To illustrate what this might involve I think it’s useful to think of how these smart women deal with problems in their daily working lives. As I said above, these women often have to manage melodramas created by people less intelligent than themselves. Observing how they do this, I’ve noticed various features. 

Smart people are quick to decide whether people can be reasoned with or not, and over what realistic time-scale. If time and the intelligence of the person allows, a smart person will see the benefit of being patient with someone. However, it’s frequently the case that people simply aren’t intelligent enough to be reasoned with within some acceptable time-scale so appropriate strategies are required. 

Often, leveraging authority has to come into play. This will involve demanding they behave in a way that isn’t disruptive if they wish to remain within the team or group. Another way I've seen effective managers work is to avoid problems such as those described above by building a team in a way that creates balance in various personalities and how they react to the ebb and flow of a work environment, while avoiding people that might cause problems via effective recruitment. 

How would the approach above work on a larger scale? Being smart, it’s likely women who’re involved in The Conversation will have some social and economic power. This could be via their jobs, for example. Political parties are dependent on donations to fund their activity, and smart women could be involved in generating those funds and influence who donates and why based on political candidates and their policies. At the extreme, these women could be involved in organising their own candidates for elections to put pressure on more established parties to adopt policies that aren’t against women’s interests. 

Other than influencing political recruitment and party policies, I suspect another strategy would be to find ways to communicate directly with ordinary people rather than waste time with the fools, charlatans, and ideologues that plague political discussions, particularly on social media. This could be by setting up websites so ordinary people could be involved in The Conversation. It’s difficult for me to imagine the smartest women I know thinking Twitter, for example, is an effective medium to genuinely influence public policy.

For clarity, I’ve focussed this post on women and feminism. But as I suggested in the Political B Team, this structural problem with political representation is much wider. I suspect The Conversation will become recognised as a broad, unavoidable, and everyday activity that’s required to manage this chronic problem with poor political representation, especially as this has made it easier for people with authoritarian traits to have influence. We have a situation where society’s natural managers are making sure the highly complex world we live in is functioning efficiently but this has left unresolved social issues in the hands of people who simply aren’t intelligent enough to resolve them. We need these managers to become involved again or social progress will stagnate or regress.

Idea: Due to crude intuitions about fetal development, abortion has been framed as an issue about conflicting rights. This has allowed Progressives to indulge in tribal politics. Consequently, there’s been a missed opportunity to consolidate access to abortion using the scientific rationale it's based on.

The US Supreme Court will overturn Roe vs Wade according to a leaked draft opinion. This would remove the constitutional right of women to access abortion. If this happens, I think Progressives have contributed to this outcome. A good point of entry to see what role they’ve played is with this video of Democrat delegate Kathy Tran. In case you don’t watch it, it shows Tran saying a Bill she’s proposing would allow a woman to request an abortion up to the point where she’s giving birth. Here’s a longer version of the video and you can google for more details. But to be clear, this failed Bill was so permissive it would have effectively made abortion legal at any point during pregnancy. How did a situation arise where a politician could propose a Bill that in theory might allow babies to be killed? 

I would say it originates from the idea abortion is about a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. Many people will hate to hear this, but in terms of the law this idea is effectively a myth. To my knowledge, there’s a limit on when abortion can be legally performed everywhere it’s legal. Therefore, as soon as the fetus is considered human, its own rights are treated as equally valid (unless the woman’s life is in danger). The inevitable consequence of claiming abortion is about the right of women to bodily autonomy is the position taken by Kathy Tran.  

In truth, behind every legal basis for abortion is a scientific argument about when a fetus can be considered human. I’ll leave the details for another post, but this scientific argument can be illustrated using its extremes. Is a fertilised egg a human being? There are people who say yes but as a scientist I would say no. Is a baby about to be born a human being? Again, as a scientist I would say yes. The question is obviously how you define when the transition between not human and human occurs. As I said, I’ll leave the details for another post but for this post I’ll just point out this transition is typically taken to be when the fetus is considered independently viable. That is, it could survive outside the mother’s womb. 

I’ll state my position clearly. Before a fetus has sufficiently developed it isn’t a human being. Therefore, over this period there are no conflicting rights. Pregnant women don’t need a right to an abortion any more than people need a right to any medical procedure. I suspect there’ll be many people who’ll be uncomfortable with this position - including people that are pro-abortion, ironically. It’s this latter point I'll explore as I think it helps to understand the psychology for how the US has found itself in the current situation with Roe vs Wade. 

I think there’s an irony at the heart of the debate about abortion. The pro- and anti-abortionists often begin at the same basic position. This is due to people relying on crude intuitions about human fetal development. For example, how they feel after seeing a picture of a fetus. Anti-abortionists allow this intuition to say life begins at conception. Pro-abortionists on the other hand often behave as if life gradually emerges from the point of conception, and as a consequence so do the rights of the fetus. The consequence of this shared intuition is that pro-abortionists effectively find themselves arguing on the terms of their opponents. That is, that a fetus is human in some way. This shared intuition has made the abortion debate about a battle of rights, with both sides arguing over whether those rights are equal or not. This fundamental problem with the abortion debate has been there from the beginning, but it is now coinciding with a problem I’ve already written about. 

I’ve suggested political activism on the Left has been taken over by a ‘B Team’ of average people now that smart people from previously disadvantaged groups are free to pursue their niche interests. Because they lack intelligence, the B Team are more prone to the kind of crude perceptions that lead to group-think and tribalism. Goals and campaigning become focused around this tribalism with little awareness there may be nuance and complexity about the real world that needs to be considered.

To illustrate how this has played out within the abortion debate, the average women who’ve taken over feminist activism seem more focused on beating men than women’s actual needs and values. And the average people who’ve taken over left-wing activism seem more interested in beating the Right and Christians than women’s access to abortion. The claim that abortion is about a women’s right to bodily autonomy has been weaponised by B Team Progressives for their political tribalism, despite how unpopular this position can become when taken too far.

To complete this post, I'll summarise the various positions on abortion as I see them. The anti-abortionists say life beings at conception. This is at least clear if unscientific, I would say. Another large section of society behave as if fetuses gradually become human from the moment of conception. The first two groups have created an environment where abortion is seen as a battle of rights. This environment has been exploited by too many Progressives to indulge in political tribalism. In contrast, the view of abortion I’ve presented states that a fetus is not human until clearly past some point within its development. Consequently, there’s no conflict of rights and access to abortion should be as routine as other medical procedures. 

I think there’s a majority of Americans who could agree with me. The intuition that human life gradually emerges is only slightly removed from understanding a fetus can be too underdeveloped to be considered human. The majority with the capacity to have this scientific view of abortion could have been leveraged to consolidate Roe vs Wade in the nearly half century since this ruling. That it wasn’t is a clear failure of the pro-abortion political establishment in the US. Women across the US may soon have to suffer unnecessary harm due to the stupidity of the Progressive left.  

Idea: people’s intuition about how to identify and classify human males and females is supported by science. The attempt to replace this with theoretical ideas from biology may be unhelpful in the battle against gender identity ideologues. 

Across nature, males produce small gametes called sperm, and females produce large gametes called eggs. Due to its consistency, gamete size can be used for sex classification (ie, whether an animal is male or female). There are no gametes intermediate in size, and each sex can only produce one type of gamete. Scientists have also theorised that sexual dimorphism may have evolved due to the emergence of anisogamy (ie, differences in gametes). Due to these properties, gamete size has become a rhetorical tool used by people who wish to challenge Gender Identity Theory and its claims that sex is socially constructed and can be changed.   

I don’t have a problem with the ‘gamete argument’ when it is used as a proxy for the real, underlying biology. The problem I have is how this rhetorical tool is sometimes used. I’ve seen it used in a way that reduces the complexity of the biology of sex to this single feature, elevates gamete size above equally important parts of the biology, and treats this component in an absolutist, ideological way. I’ll illustrate the first two problems using the most extreme example I can think of. 

A gene will consist of a mix of four types of nucleotides linked together in their 1000s. Some disorders of sexual development (DSD) can result from a single error in one of these nucleotides, and this error may make the individual infertile. The human genome is about 3,000,000,000 nucleotides long, with ongoing research how much of this is actually functional. So, after millions of years of evolution and billions of nucleotides just one error can make an individual an evolutionary dead end because they can’t reproduce. And I'm meant to believe single nucleotides like this will be less of a defining feature for either male or female biology than gamete size? 

From single nucleotides to genitals and everything in between, anything that male or female biological sex is functionally dependent on is a defining feature. One of these features is anisogamy until science unambiguously shows this is the functional origin of the rest of the biology. Until it does this, the functional origin of the biology of sex is reproduction, and an organism’s sex-specific phenotype is the evolutionary endpoint for this functional goal. Various hypotheses have been put forward why sexual reproduction evolved. 

I need to clarify what my aim is with the post Biological Sex and related posts. I’m interested in contributing to the discussion about how to challenge Gender Identity Theory. But who is my intended audience? I’m not interested in the fools, charlatans, and ideologues you might find on Twitter or within Humanities departments. I’m not interested in contributing to theoretical and academic arguments about whether anisogamy is the cause or consequence of sex-specific phenotypes across the whole of nature. I’m interested in helping ordinary people who want to make scientifically valid statements about the biology of sex in humans. 

Gender identity ideology wants to medicalise vulnerable children because they don’t conform to gender stereotypes. It wants to put male rapists in women’s prisons, make women’s sport redundant by the inclusion of males, and ruin the lives and careers of those that challenge it. I want to speak to people who may be confronted by someone in an organisation that’s been captured by this ideology. They need arguments that are scientifically valid and reflect their intuition. 

I think their intuition is that the biology of sex is complex and too difficult to change. And they are correct. Their intuition is that a human male can be identified by having a penis. And this is correct. Their intuition says that rare occasions where facial hair, breasts, and genitals can’t be used to classify the sex of someone doesn’t change whether these things are part of some general design. And this is correct.  If you’re someone who thinks these things then science has generated textbook-level knowledge that supports your intuitions. The words and concepts you need are defined in my post Biological Sex; they are genotype, phenotype, natural selection, biological function, and variation, etc. 

Those of us that are trying to challenge Gender Identity Theory have to appreciate that because our opponents are unreachable by evidence and reason this is primarily a political battle. That is, a power struggle to prevent one group securing rights and power over others. As with all political battles messaging is important for reaching those that are open to your viewpoint. The true statement that human males can be identified by a list of physical features that includes having a penis is clear and intuitive. I've seen people involved in this debate, including scientists, say that genitals etc aren’t sufficient to classify males and females but gamete size is. This isn’t helping. It’s particular contradictory when people who claim to be on the same side like to ask politicians and others, “Can a woman have a penis?”. Well, can a man?

The average person has no idea what a gamete is, or its hypothesised position within the evolution of males and females. If someone ever needs to challenge Gender Identity Theory, they don’t have to immediately use the terms I defined in my post Biological Sex but at least they’ll know they exist, fit their intuitions, can be used by themselves and others if needed, and are a much stronger argument than presented by gender identity ideologues.  

Finally, in the post Biological Sex I put function as the driving force behind the biology of sex and, again, I think this will appeal to people’s intuition. Absolutist claims about the theorised importance of gametes are a weaker argument, I’d say, and feel like an attempt to replace Gender Identity Theory with a Gamete Identity Theory. The tldr for the post Biological Sex is that the scientific explanation for the biology of sex is so far ahead of anything else that it’s the only practical option for decision making. I prefer this rationale over anything that claims certainty. 

In summary, academic arguments about the role of anisogamy within the emergence of the human male and female phenotype are redundant for using these phenotypes as a means to identify and classify biological males and females. And they don’t change whether these phenotypes represent biology that is binary and immutable. The intuition of ordinary people is correct on this issue, and this intuition is required to gather support to challenge Gender Identity Theory.

NB. This post was prompted by my subscriber ‘Steersman’ who commented on the post Biological Sex. It’s worth looking at those comments as they have lots of citations and present some alternative views.  

I need a post about the biology of sex to complement the one I wrote on Gender. What I would like to do with this post is give you a genuine account of how science understands sex, and then discuss how the scientific method has generated this knowledge. 

I’ll describe some concepts first: 

-(Biological) Function – this is the purpose behind some biology and the glue that coordinates its parts. In the case of sex, it’s reproduction. 

-Genotype – the set of instructions (eg, genes) that define the limits and potential for an organism. 

-Phenotype – the realisation of an organism’s genotype within some environment. This will also be influenced by random variation during development (ie, because the genotype can’t exactly plan the outcome).  

-(Biological) Variation – take height, someone’s genotype can determine the range of possibility but their exact height (the phenotype) will be influenced by their environment (eg, nutrition) and randomness as their body develops. In contrast to this normal variation, there’s abnormal variation due to (typically) errors in the genotype. 

-(Evolutionary) Selection and fitness – these are concepts from evolutionary theory; they basically mean that any variation in the genotype will be selected by evolution to persist across generations if it improves how well an organism fits into its environment. 

-Distributions and averages – the toy graph in my post Gender illustrates these concepts. It’s very difficult to discuss the topic of sex and gender unless people understand these ideas. The average of some distribution will be an abstraction removed from the real things that generated that average but it may still be useful and give insight.  

Now I've outlined some concepts I’ll give an overview of the biology of sex while also highlighting some scenarios that appear to question this knowledge. 

Apart from a relatively small number of differences, males and females share the same basic set of instructions for how to build a human. There are about 30,000 genes in the human genome, plus lots of genetic information surrounding these genes that regulate them. What differs between males and females is the time and place this genetic information is engaged. This leads to two outcomes: specific differences between the sexes, such as genitals; or, the relative proportions between shared features will differ based on sex, such as with facial features. Both of these situations require an incredible degree of coordination so that the end result produces a human that can perform all the functions that are required to survive and reproduce. All parts of the genome will be directly and indirectly affected by this moth vs butterfly transformation, and this biological process is so complex it’s taken millions of years to evolve. 

In humans, the genetic instructions selected by evolution that allow us to reproduce only produce two functional outcomes, males and females. As I’ll detail below, one of the simplest ways to see this is that when the signals that engage either the male or female route are weakened it generates a phenotype that has no functional relationship to the purpose of sex (ie, reproduction), and in fact may prevent it. There will be other sources of variation as well, as is normal for the genotype to phenotype relationship. The genotype can’t exactly determine the phenotype, so someone’s environment plus randomness during development will contribute to the eventual outcome. Again, as before, this variation has no functional relationship to the purpose of sex.  

Before I examine various scenarios that cause confusion within this debate, I’ll quickly summarise some key ideas I think act as criteria for deciding whether something is part of the biology of sex. Firstly, there must be a functional relationship that would have been selected for by evolution. Secondly, variation per se is not part of the biology if it has no functional relationship to it. Thirdly, the biology of sex has to be consistent with the rest of biology and science; arbitrary claims about what should be included within the scope of the biology of sex should be treated by the same standard as any other area of science.  

Some people misunderstand the relationship normal biological variation has to sex classification. Take faces. Noses, mouths, and eyes will have a distribution in size and shape that happens for no other reason than evolution has decided a certain amount of variation is tolerable. Males and females will on average have facial features that are similar in size and shape but there will inevitably be some overlap. A male with a ‘feminine’ nose isn’t less male. It’s just a random event unconnected to their biological sex. Also, when you have millions of people it’s inevitable that some individuals will by chance alone have a nose, mouth, and eyes etc that appear to be more like the opposite sex, but again this is just a random event. This kind of variation has no functional relationship to biological sex and therefore plays no role in sex classification whether that’s with the sex binary or as evidence for a spectrum of sex. 

Another source of variation are mutations in the genotype. Mutations are a routine part of our biology. In fact, our biology is effectively the result of millions of years of mutations selected by evolution because they improved our ability to fit into our environments. What’s important here is that it’s selection not mutations that’s important. In other words, the mutations have to have some functional relevance to the biology. There are multiple ‘disorders of sexual development’ (DSD) that consist of these non-functional mutations. In some cases, the signals that orientate our genotype towards the male or female route are weakened, but rather than create a functional intermediate phenotype they create a condition that justifies the label ‘disorder’. There’s no reason to treat a DSD any differently than other instances of biology impacted by non-functional mutations. Someone with a DSD is, or would have been, either a male or a female but instead they have a sex specific disorder. DSDs are not evidence of a spectrum of sex because they have no functional relationship to the biology of sex.   

So, people’s bodies are either male or female, but what about their brains? Our brains are made up of areas specialised for various aspects of our mental activity. It’s possible these areas, on average, differ based on biological sex, and there’s evidence to support this. Similar to the faces example above, it’s therefore possible that males, for example, may due to chance have brain areas, or even many areas, that are more like those found in females. Alternatively, like people with a DSD, there may be situations where males have female-like brains without that being something that was selected for during evolution. Do these two scenarios mean that a male with a female-like brain is less of a biological male? No. These differences are just the result of non-functional variation. 

An interesting alternative is that evolution has designed the human brain to differentiate along two paths that have subsequently been labelled as masculine and feminine, and society assigns these traits based on biological sex even though they’re spread across both sexes. However, because evolution has evolved these innate behaviours to be present in both sexes they’re not therefore functionally related to sex. It’s just society that’s created this association. I’ll discuss in another post how these ideas may help to explain why some trans people feel they’re the opposite sex. 

In summary, whether it’s the body or the brain the biology of sex has only one purpose: to facilitate reproduction via males and females. Non-functional variation that’s superficially related to sex is irrelevant to this biology. You can only be a male or a female, and these two states are so complex and differentiated that it’s impossible to transition between them. 

How was this knowledge generated? I’ll leave the details for other posts, but the scientific method is a general-purpose means to observe the world with increasing resolution. Properly understood, this method and its output is still dependent on belief, but its closeness to truth can be readily measured by its explanatory power, usefulness, and consistency. It has openness and doubt baked into it; if it didn’t, it wouldn’t have progressed. 

In opposition to the scientific method and its body of knowledge are the claims of gender identity theory. For example, that sex is socially constructed, or that it isn’t binary. The claims of this theory are a good way to illustrate the focus of Structured Openness. I can take seriously that part of gender identity theory where I'm required to be open. It may well be the case that sex isn’t binary, for example. However, this theory has no useful structure, and can’t produce any. It just consists of unproductive beliefs and unevidenced claims. 

Gender identity theory can’t compete with the scientific method and the body of knowledge it’s generated. It has no means to generate useful concepts such as genotype, phenotype, variation, and natural selection. Belief in the scientific method can give structure to openness in a way that beliefs like gender identity theory can’t. In fact, such beliefs are dogmatic and in opposition to being open. 

You’re smarter when you believe in the scientific method and its output. Don’t believe me? Trying living without it, which is what beliefs like gender identity theory require. Why? Because the biology of sex is just one part of a system of knowledge generated by the same method. Dismiss the biology of sex and you dismiss science.  

This post has already been longer than I would normally like a post to be, but I'll say one last thing. Gender identity advocates frequently say ‘transwomen are women’ and ‘transmen are men’. If male and female refer to biological sex, then the science on this issue is clear: transwomen are male, and transmen are female. I’ll discuss whether they’re men and women in another post.

I’ve written about the ‘Political B Team’, which consists of average people who’ve taken over political activism now that the smartest people from previously disadvantaged groups are free to pursue their niche interests. But who are these ‘smartest people’, and what makes them smart? 

There’s a moment in this interview with Germaine Greer that I love; it starts at about 1:00 in the video, but especially from 1:35 onwards until 2:30. In case you don’t watch it, Greer says she’s not in favour of equality if this means an equal split of the status quo, but she is for the liberation of woman from this situation (and by extension everyone, I’d say). Not only is Greer deeply aware of this status quo but she says in relation to what liberation from it would look like that, ‘I can’t tell you what’s round the corner, because I don’t know’. 

This is real intelligence. Academic-type intelligence can influence how quickly and comprehensively people acquire what’s already been established and this will impact the point of entry they have within a debate – but without insight, imagination, doubt, creativity, intuition, humility, and self-awareness academic intelligence is just robotic, especially within the social sphere.  

What Greer is illustrating is a capacity to be aware of and doubt what her subconscious may be automatically generating, and then imagination and creativity to go beyond what she’s learnt. In terms of the specifics of that interview, this way of thinking would be inconceivable for many people who are interested in the topics discussed. As I said in ‘Unholy Allies’, ‘We may be in a weird, temporary moment where society has opened up a space for people to question gender while at the same time there’s still enough gendered behaviour around for a significant percentage of society to form essentialist views about it based on unchallenged, automatic perceptions generated by their brains.’ 

It takes time for the whole of society to become genuinely aware of some truth about the world, especially if this challenges automatic perceptions. Large sections of society can be decades behind the people who first initiated some social progress. Unfortunately, we’ve found ourselves in a situation where the pushback against social progress, bizarrely by people calling themselves progressives, is becoming extreme, and I suspect this is because some automatic perceptions are very fundamental to how some people think. As a consequence, we’re seeing the return of people who can see beyond these perceptions. Although this time rather than fighting for the right to explore their individual interests, they’re now having to spend time away from their niche interests to battle this new regressive movement, sometimes to the point of those careers being threatened by ‘cancel culture’. 

Who are these people? In the UK and in relation to challenging gender ideology, you have: Rosie Kay (dancer, director, and writer), Emma Hilton (developmental biologist), Kathleen Stock (philosopher in the area of aesthetics, fiction, and imagination), Helen Joyce (mathematician and journalist), Maya Forstater (business and international development researcher). How many of these women are professional political activists? None.  

These are effectively the same people from generations ago battling the same enemy: mindless people who can’t see beyond their automatic perceptions. Except now rather than there being two genders that people must conform to based on their biology, sex is no longer an objective fact and there’s an endless number of gender boxes to put people in. It’s still the case that for many people their brains tell them essential boxes exist and everyone must be in one, regardless of reality or what conflict this generates.

How do we play this ‘generation game’ between the first, smartest people who initiate some social progress and later generations who might misunderstand or reject this change? I think one important insight is we have to be realistic about who can and can’t understand it. Some people are so incurious about where their thoughts and feelings originate they will treat them as essential and true regardless of what reasonable people say and do. I suspect these kind of people are in the minority. For the majority, as has been the case for other social progress, it’ll just take time.

What’s intelligence? We don’t know is the simple answer. Scientific disciplines like physics, chemistry, or biology can accurately define the things they label, but this isn’t the case for those that study intelligence. What’s important in this comparison is how those disciplines make a connection between some testable, physical reality and what’s being labelled. I would say we will know what intelligence is when we can unambiguously link the biology of the brain with behaviour we label as intelligent. And as I suggested in ‘Reclaiming The Word Intelligence’ this may collapse the word intelligence and its synonyms into a single physical or biological mechanism. 

So, we don’t know what intelligence is, but I think there is a test for when people are debating intelligently and it’s built from the ‘First Assumption’, which goes: any well-defined social problem will have an objectively true answer, to the point of being just one answer if the problem is sufficiently well-defined. This idea is inspired by the ‘hard’ sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. For example, take the way physics can exactly define the path of a thrown object if the initial conditions are known. What’s important here is there’s an objective, rule-based world outside our own minds that we just discover. 

The First Assumption seems to me a natural extension of the discovery we live in a rule-based, material world that exists independent of our own minds. How can people and society be separate from this? And what’s driving our behaviour if we are? Magic, God? I don’t accept these explanations. I’m a scientist, and this blog will be based on the assumption there are single, objectively true answers to well-defined social problems.  

So, how might the First Assumption improve our discussions? Think about a question such as, ‘how can we reduce poverty?’ A question such as this often divides along political lines, but this implies there are multiple ways to answer this question. Imagine instead people debating this question assumed an intelligent examination of it would naturally find a single, objectively true answer; this would be transformative. I’ll use this question about reducing poverty as a way to illustrate the First Assumption in more concrete terms in another post but this assumption can also be illustrated using simple problems as examples. 

Take something really basic like needing to walk across a room to pick up a cup. No one would suggest there’s a Right-wing or Left-wing way of doing this, or that you would need to consider various confirmation biases or motivated reasoning. What’s needed to complete the action is obvious because the required information is saturated, and everyone would agree. I would suggest that when people have similar goals the only reason they disagree on solutions to problems is because the necessary knowledge and understanding is either currently not complete or one or more of those debating lack awareness of what’s already established, or the intelligence to acquire it. There’s also the problem of how well a problem has been sufficiently defined, but this feeds back to how well the situation is understood. And how well a problem is understood can also impact how people frame their goals, with a convergence towards similar goals when people are being intelligent.  

The First Assumption generates a useful rule of thumb that when a diverse group of people are debating intelligently they will naturally coalesce around a single solution to some well-defined problem. They don’t need to share the same values or like each other because the objective limits for how a problem can be resolved will be the same regardless of who they are or what they would prefer to be true. The emphasis on arguing intelligently is essential and unavoidable which is why I’ve referred to it already during my blog posts and will continue to do this. 

To summarise, people and society are as much part of an objective, rule-based world as everything else. If objective truths exist then it must follow that people are being objectively more or less intelligent when trying to discover these truths. As I stated in ‘Reclaiming The Word Intelligence’, I don’t think intelligence is a fixed thing we can currently measure and which people have equally available in all situations. It’s more like a temporary state specifically related to some truth about the external world that has a complex relationship to lots of factors that we’re only just discovery and which I’ll discuss in other posts. So, throughout this blog I’ll make claims about when I think people are discovering truths about the world or not. And if the ideas in this post are true, then people will be able to make objectively true claims about whether I’ve been intelligent when I’m wrong.

Idea: society's collective subconscious is trying to reverse the social progress that reduced the importance of gender via an unholy alliance of transgender activists and banal people 

In the post ‘Gender’ I suggested that many people struggle to understand that behaviour labelled as masculine or feminine can have both a biological and cultural origin, and that the average of both these factors across society presents as a ‘binary distribution’ that ‘people aren’t aware their brain is automatically noticing’. It’s this last point that I’ll explore in this post. 

Transgender activism has entered mainstream political discussions very rapidly. One aspect that’s remarkable is how widespread and immediate the support has been compared to other civil rights issues. Government, business, party politics, and ordinary people have all rallied around the idea there are people ‘born in the wrong body’, even children who don’t conform to gender stereotypes are labelled as trans and anyone who doesn’t affirm this is accused of transphobia. This social phenomenon is incredible but in keeping with one of the themes of Structured Openness there may be a simple neuroscience inspired explanation. 

Without consciously interrogating our perceptions using our intelligence, we are left with nothing more than thoughts and feelings automatically generated by the machinery of our brains. These are brains that are designed to notice patterns in the information we receive from our senses, and form generalisations based on this information, which as I said in ‘The Neuroscience Revolution’ can fundamentally impact how truthful our understanding of the world is. The worst outcome for this process is a combination between poor generalisations and no conscious examination. In this scenario, people can treat their perceptions as an essential feature of the world while being completely unaware they may not be true. 

This is what I think is happening with the current transgender movement. An unholy alliance has emerged between two groups. Both automatically perceive the gender binary, leave this perception unchallenged, and treat it as an essential component of people’s identity. But a majority are OK with the gender society assumes they have while a minority aren’t. We may be in a weird, temporary moment where society has opened up a space for people to question gender while at the same time there’s still enough gendered behaviour around for a significant percentage of society to form essentialist views about it based on unchallenged, automatic perceptions generated by their brains. Ironically, the progress made on gender may be creating its own regressive backlash.  

What exactly is this progress, though? For me, it’s two-fold. The first was to encourage people to question whether gender identity really is an essential part of everyone’s personality. It doesn’t mean much to many people, whether they do or don’t conform to the gender stereotypes in the time and place they live in. And conforming to these stereotypes might conflict with their individuality, especially if this includes behaviour associated with the opposite gender. The second was to challenge compelled gendered behaviour that’s genuinely harmful to either individuals or those around them. For example, making men feel they shouldn’t seek help for depression and how this impacts violence or suicide rates amongst men. 

There’s a fashion for questioning gender stereotypes which I think has gone too far, though. We’re social animals that like to associate based on identities. This doesn’t have to be harmful if it leaves uninterested others alone, and these identities aren’t toxic. This isn’t what the trans backlash involves, though. This is a wish to re-establish gender as an essential part of everyone’s identity, with the support of an army of mindless people who don’t question their automatically generated perceptions of the world. 

On this reactionary base, other players in this debate have seen opportunities. Politicians seeking votes, businesses with things to sell, etc. This has certainly added some momentum but fundamentally I’d say what’s driving this moment is something quite rudimentary: an automatic and unquestioned perception that gender is an essential aspect of someone’s identity. Everything else follows from this. 

As I’ve done elsewhere and will continue to do in this blog, I’m effectively questioning the intelligence of a group of people. This is unavoidable as I outlined in ‘Reclaiming the Word Intelligence’. However, I’m writing another post to clarify what I’ve already said and will write many posts on this topic. It’s natural that due to the way intelligence is currently understood how I use this word could be considered offence or arrogant. It’s clearly for me to clarify why this isn’t the case. 

On this issue of intelligence, though, I think there’s an important get-out clause that applies to transgender people if not those supporting them. Many of the people supporting gender identity theory are banal, in the banality of evil sense. Their intellectual blandness allows charlatans and ideologues to cause harm. Is what they are supporting evil? Well children are being sterilised because they don’t conform to gender stereotypes, so you decide.

Trans identifying people have to live in a society heavily influenced by these banal people who maintain an environment where not conforming to gender stereotypes encourages ridicule if not outright hate. Even if transgender people do have an intelligent understanding of sex and gender, the simplest option may be to claim they have a pseudo-medical condition or ‘gendered soul’; that is, things that the army of banal people will accept as reasons not to conform to the role the banal people have given them. It seems to me then that this a reason to be understanding to transgender people during this period. It’s in fact society that’s still transitioning to a place where it’ll accept their individuality. 

Quick note: I seemed to have picked up some additional subscribers since I posted ‘Gender’.  So, hello and thanks for subscribing. It’s exciting and a little daunting to have people curious to share my thoughts about people, minds, and brains. I’m going to try and post at least once a week, maybe more if I can find the time away from work and life!  

There’s an obsession with gender identity these days. This often toxic debate frequently includes claims about whether sex-specific behaviours (i.e., behaviour often associated with males or females) are biological in origin or not. Many feminists claim that gender is completely “socially constructed”, while transgender activists might claim they “just know” their gender so it must be innate. Neither of these claims seem to me particularly well founded. 

I’ll deal with the evidence base for and against both claims in separate posts; this post is more focussed on a concept that I think both sides struggle with, which is that sex-specific behaviour for individuals can have both a biological origin and be socially constructed. To illustrate this, look at the figure below: 

Across time and in different places, what counts as masculine and feminine has varied, but we can agree, I’d imagine, that wherever you’re reading this you and those around you have an idea what these labels refer to. The horizontal axis on the graph above illustrates this division. We can imagine that every individual will be a collection of feminine and masculine behaviour that positions them somewhere on the horizontal line. Three things are noticeable when this is plotted based on number of people (i.e., the vertical axis). Biological males and females cluster into two groups, most people are averagely masculine or feminine within their respective group; and there’s overlap of the distributions, especially with just biologically driven sex-specific behaviour. 

As I’ll discuss in separate posts, on average there are biologically driven differences in sex-specific behaviour which societies have added to and reinforced to construct what we label as gender. It’s the difference between the ‘on average’ and how that relates to individuals where much of the confusion and anger originates. This is especially the case when people aren’t aware their brain is automatically noticing the binary distribution in the figure above and they expect people, based on their biological sex, to conform to whatever ‘average’ exists in the time and place they live in (see the point about how we make generalisations in the post ‘The Neuroscience Revolution’ for more on this).

In certain contexts, it may be useful to reference the ‘average man’ or ‘average woman’, but this is a statistical concept. It doesn’t define any particular individual, unless by chance. You can see when people are struggling with this idea when, for example, someone says to a woman, “women prefer x”, and they reply, “but I don’t prefer x”, or, “I have friends that don’t prefer x”. This rebuttal just illustrates this person doesn’t understand the concept of a ‘population average’. The correct response would be to challenge whether the average actually exists, if that’s the case. Properly understood, individual instances that vary from the average are in fact part of what makes the average an average! 

Being able to understand what a population average is and how it’s made up of individuals that vary by some characteristic is a key insight to release people from much of the toxicity surrounding the gender identity debate. Almost all the thoughts and feelings about gender that people have can be understood by this insight: people’s intuition that a gender binary exists, women who have no need for a gender identity, men who want to be ‘feminine’, the science showing biology contributes to sex-specific behaviour, gender being socially constructed, etc. It can’t incorporate, however, a situation where biological males are biological females simply because they feel they are, and I’ll deal with this in separate posts. 

The ideas set out above aren’t novel. What is novel to this post and in keeping with one of the general themes of Structured Openness is that you need a certain level of intelligence to understand these concepts. The toxicity of the debate about gender is often driven by the negative emotions that naturally follow when people argue because they lack the necessary knowledge and understanding to see where they could find common ground, or understand their own thoughts and feelings better. 

Before I end this post, I’ll quickly mention some caveats I'll deal with in other posts. I’d imagine some people might claim that others can understand the concept of a population average, for example, but they ignore it or refuse to accept it due to things like ‘motivated reasoning’. I’m currently writing a post to challenge the idea of motivated reasoning. In short, I don’t think it exists as commonly imagined. It’s intelligence (as outlined in the posts ‘Reclaiming The Word Intelligence’ and ‘The First Assumption’) that determines differences in people’s opinions when they share similar goals. In Reclaiming the Word Intelligence, I also stated that I don’t think most complex behaviour is biologically determined. This would seem to clash with what I’ve said in this post, so I’m also writing something that will try and deal with the issue that some complex behaviour appears to be influenced by innate biology.  

I’m writing this out of frustration. I’m finding it impossible to write other posts because I’m using the word intelligence and its synonyms in a way I know people will object to. I’ll just bullet point some thoughts about this word and its use. 

• I’ll start with some questions to appeal to your intuition:

  -Do you think only people with academic ability are intelligent?

  -Think of all the behaviour you might feel comfortable describing as smart (eg, social behaviour, compelling art, starting a successful business). Do you feel you should stop doing this? Maybe you should only use that word for performance on IQ tests? 

  -Does someone always exhibit the same level of intelligence in every situation? 

  -If someone is told an undeniable fact they’d rather not hear, is a refusal to accept it a reflection of their intelligence? 

  -What’s more likely to be productive: people with common social goals but different opinions debating in good faith about their knowledge and understanding, or demands by each side that the other accept they’re immoral and their ideas are driven by harmful emotions? If someone by default insists on choosing the latter, are they being smart or stupid? 

  -Imagine you have two equally selfish people. One understands they need to display pro-social behaviour to be successful and the other doesn’t. What’s determining the difference between them? 

  -Intuitively, are the words intelligent, reasonable, stupid, smart, rational, wise, describing different versions of a similar process or are they fundamentally different things, like the words river and chair, for example? 

• The questions above appeal to our intuition that intelligence and its synonyms is at the heart of everything we do. We are after all homo sapiens, wise apes. I think we need to rediscover the intuition that led Carl Linnaeus to give us this label over 200 hundred years ago. Discussions about our behaviour have become unproductive and often toxic due to second hand knowledge about academic disciplines that themselves are still young. We spend too much time talking about emotions, motivations, values, and biases when people often have the same underlying humanity but different levels of knowledge and understanding. In other words, they’re being more or less wise, or they’re being more or less intelligent.  

• Based on my background in molecular and cellular neuroscience, I think: 

  -In plain English, the points below claim that intelligence refers to the basic biological process that makes us human and our intuitive use of this word is required for us to talk intelligently about our behaviour.  

  -In less plain English... most complex behaviour isn’t directly generated by brain-specific genes; they’re too few in number to generate this complexity directly.  

  -To allow complex behaviour to emerge, brain-specific genes organise information derived from the senses so that it can be processed by the same basic mechanism (or maybe a few mechanisms). In other words, these basic processes are repeated across discrete anatomical regions of the brain that are organised based on the type of information they process. 

  -The purpose of the brain is to mirror the casual structure of the external world so that basic motives can be satisfied. 

  -The end result or the process of mirroring the structure of the external world is what we refer to as ‘intelligence’ and its synonyms. It is the basic process that makes us human. 

  -The word intelligence and its synonyms should be set aside for use in natural, intuitive language to discuss human behaviour. Academic disciplines, for example, should generate their own labels for intelligence, or at the very least their definitions of intelligence should be understood as only applicable within the confines of their academic activity. 

• To reinforce the last point above, I’m suggesting common usage of words related to intelligence has split, in a contradictory and unproductive way, between our intuitive understanding and a perception of what science claims. For example, we naturally describe all kinds of behaviour as smart or stupid, but it’s not uncommon to see people claim that you need to be good academically to be intelligent. 

• Concepts such as IQ have led to the belief that people have a fixed amount of intelligence they apply constantly, whereas I think we naturally view intelligence as something that ebbs and flows and should be judged on a case-by-case basis.

• As I’ll suggest in other posts, intelligence creates the diversity of emotions, motivation, and biases etc that we’re familiar with from a common set of basic needs (e.g. sex, food, community, etc). Therefore, it’s intelligence that creates our emotions, not our emotions that influence our intelligence.

• We need to have more intellectual humility! We should normalise the questioning of each other’s intelligence because intelligence determines everything we do and people can be more or less intelligent in any given situation. 

I think I’ll leave this post here despite having much more to say! In summary, intelligence is the basic biological process that makes us human. Our intuitive understanding of it, as expressed in natural language, is currently closer to the truth than half-understood ideas from relatively young academic disciplines. Intelligence ebbs and flows and we should accept we can’t discuss our behaviour without referring to it, and while accepting our own limitations.  

The first step in this revolution is something you’re already familiar with. The way science can dictate the terms of a discussion. For example, diseases used to be considered the result of evil spirits or moral failings, whereas now we understand they're the consequence of biology we have little if any control over. The key insight is that the terms of the debate about disease is limited. The biology of disease isn’t considered one of many options that also includes evil spirits. The scientific explanation is considered the objective truth and the only acceptable source of information. This is how I see insights from neuroscience will influence the debate we have about society and ourselves. 

So what are these insights? I’ll give some examples but this post is just an intro to many others. These examples represent what I already know about (I’m a neuroscientist), what I would like to learn more about, and novel ideas of my own: 

The frontal lobe – this area of the brain plays an essential role in making us human. It allows us to plan ahead and put various options into a broader context, particularly socially. Without it we would live in the moment and be indifferent to how our behaviour is impacting others. I’ll discuss how society-wide improvements in the frontal lobe function of individual members may underlie differences between societies.  

Generalisations – one of the ways we resolve the problem of living in a complex world that contains large amounts of information is by forming generalisations. Apples and oranges become fruit, for example, or people become grouped into ethnicities based on superficial physical characteristics. The successes and failures of our framing of ourselves and the world are often directly related to the truth of the generalisations we make. 

Intelligence – in some respects, this blog is really about trying to understand intelligence and how it affects our behaviour. As I'll expand in multiple posts, I think intelligence really is everything and all we are. I’ll use the intuitive, everyday use of the word ‘intelligence’, rather than the academic version that defines intelligence in terms of specific cognitive skills (as measured by IQ tests, for example). The spread of this academic definition of intelligence has had a negative influence on our discussions about human behaviour, I’d say, especially as it relates to debates about social issues. 

Time and Energy – both of these are a call to recognise the brain has ‘engineering’ limits that have to be appreciated. It takes time to learn, and we don’t have an unlimited amount of energy to do it. To illustrate how I might discuss this feature of our brains take this example. The ratio between jobs that require academic skills vs physical abilities has shifted to the former in modern economies, but how has that affected people’s ability to think about social issues? That is, if people expend more of their mental time and energy on work, might they have less resources available for understanding and thinking about social issues? I’ll discuss this.  

Scale – this requires multiple posts to explain, but the basic idea is that large scale society-wide events are just the aggregation of smaller scale individual behaviour, which is itself determined by features of the brain which are shared. As neuroscience has more influence on our discussions about society we will focus on this smaller scale, how the shared features of our brains might be generating society-wide events, and what action we can take at the level of individuals if we want to change some outcome. How we currently understand human behaviour at the level of whole societies – that it is due to belief systems, or explained by sociological and political theories – will be replaced by this more neuroscience driven analysis.  

I imagine the neuroscience inspired ideas above would be known and understood at a basic level, just enough to limit the terms of a debate. And they would become a routine part of everyday life. For example, we would enter discussions conscious we’re making generalisations and expect them to be examined. We already do this to some degree but one of the points of this blog post is that this process will become routine and an expectation will emerge that people need to show humility about an often error prone way of perceiving the world. 

One last point before completely this post. I can imagine some people would think that the ideas above a better classified as part of psychology or some other discipline. But in fact, I think ideas about the brain and mind won’t really take a hold in our discussions until they have a more solid grounding in the biology of the brain, as determined by neuroscience.  

I’ve never liked the phrase ‘common sense’. I’m a scientist. I want to hear specifics about facts and hypotheses that I can independently verify. The idea there’s some magical shared knowledge that’s just obvious goes against how I believe we should understand ourselves and the world. But… I also don’t feel comfortable being completely dismissive, and the reason is because of the success of democracies.  

Scientists think in terms of the number of repeats for an experiment, the ‘n number’, as important for how confident you can be you’ve observed a genuine phenomenon. So, what’s the n number for democracy? It’s dozens of countries, representing 100s of millions of people, voting over multiple generations. Democracy is a huge experiment. And what are the results? It’s self-evident that when the whole of a society is asked to choose who should govern and under what policies the trend is towards materially successful and stable countries that progress socially. I’ll say much more about democracy in separate posts, but for now I’ll just leave this observation here as evidence for some kind of shared and effective understanding about the world. 

Is there a more formal, scientific way to form an ‘effective understanding about the world’?  Regression analysis is a statistical technique for predicting future events based on correlations in data. For example, a typical application might be to predict the chance of getting cancer based on genetics, exposure to toxins, and age, etc. Regression analysis is widely used. It’s often behind many expert predictions. 

An example of regression analysis was the predictions that were presented to the British public leading up to the vote to leave the European Union. An example from this analysis was the statement that following a vote to leave the EU, ‘Britain would be permanently poorer by the equivalent of £4,300 per household by 2030 and every year thereafter’. Very specific expert predictions about the economic consequences of Brexit played a major role in the incumbent government’s case for remaining in the EU. 

I’m not interested in the accuracy of these predictions. The purpose of this blog post is to examine the weighting people gave these predictions as part of their own analysis about the Brexit vote. This analysis considered much more than just the economic consequences of Brexit. One of the most important topics was immigration from the EU. 

People considered things such as: would they be happy with the social change that might come with further immigration? Would people within their social circle or wider community be happy with these changes, and how do they imagine they would react if unhappy? Would their local or wider physical environment sustain more immigration (roads, housing, schools, nature, etc)? Did they trust those with power, in particular politicians, to listen to any practical problems that might arise from further immigration? Would they materially benefit from more immigration, either directly or indirectly?  

The questions above are only a small sample of the things people might have considered worth thinking about. And these questions would be relevant across different social scales (personal, family, community, national) and across different time-scales (their own life, children, grandchildren). One of the first things to notice is how incredibly complex this analysis is. Trying to understand and find correlations within the behaviour of dozens to 1000s of people over time and under different scenarios so that predictions can be made is clearly very difficult, no? But, and this is a key point in this blog post, people thinking about the Brexit vote wouldn’t have considered these questions optional. They had to have an answer. And short of an army of experts providing a regression analysis specifically tailored to each voter, these questions would have to be answered by people themselves. 

Another thing to notice is how minor the expert regression analysis above becomes in the context of the wider analysis each person is making. Whether they believe it or not doesn't really matter. It’s just too simple to outweigh the more complex analysis each voter is making. And this is the key idea in this post. People will be reluctant to replace a complex analysis, whatever its quality, with a simple analysis, whatever its claimed accuracy. 

An obvious rebuttal to the argument above is that those who voted to remain in the EU did accept the expert analysis of the economic consequences of leaving. To that I would say I don’t actually believe this was the reason they voted to remain in the EU. I think their analysis was just as complex and the expert predictions were just supplementary. In fact, what’s never considered is that both sides of the Brexit divide may have been correct in the actual analysis they were making. That is, those who voted Remain would have continued to be happy within the EU, and those that voted Leave would have become increasingly unhappy. It just turned out that on the day there was more of the latter than the former.  

Scientists have suggested our brains are prediction machines. This is one of the reasons why I think it’s futile to expect people to replace complex predictions with simple ones in situations where a complex analysis is required. It’s just not how our brains work. People’s lived experience includes a huge amount more information about people and society than an expert prediction would ever include. It’s completely unrealistic to expect people to disregard this information and the predictions they make from it. And if you think these predictions are poor, explain the success of democracies.  

The left of the political spectrum is concerned with promoting diversity, compassion, and tolerance, etc. That’s the narrative, isn’t it? But is it true? 

Political psychology has a couple of insights that may help answer this question. Firstly, it hasn’t found a clear difference between liberals and conservatives in terms of how much empathy and compassion they experience; if anything, it seems it may be just a difference in who these emotions are directed towards, with conservatives favouring people within their own group (friends, family, local community, etc). Secondly, traditional conservatism is wary of “change, uncertainty, and novelty” as the political scientist Karen Stenner describes at about 4min into this podcast, and by extension liberals are more comfortable with those things. 

It occurred to me while considering these two findings that it may go part of the way to explaining why there’s often this contradiction between the narrative about the Left being kind and tolerant and the reality that modern progressives are frequently neither of these things. 

In the post-war period, there’s been significant progress in removing inequalities based on sex, race, and sexuality. Each of these battles was socially novel at the time, but, and this is shown by the success of each campaign, clearly worthy of engaging empathy and compassion regardless of political orientation. These social changes were overdue and ready for broad acceptance, but liberals, with their preference for novel social change, simply got their first. And as a consequence, a narrative emerged that liberals are more empathic because this emotion was leveraged as part of each campaign. 

This idea can help to explain why the behaviour of modern progressives can in fact seem so regressive. Rather than being motivated by a higher moral standard they’re simply elevating social novelty as a goal above all else. For example, progressives in recent years have aggressively pushed the idea that gender non-conforming children should be treated as having a pseudo-medical condition that requires pathologizing their healthy bodies so they can ‘transition’ to the opposite sex. Here’s the thing. Genuinely intelligent and compassionate people simply have no need for this new idea. They don’t need to collapse human individuality and diversity into redundant labels and old stereotypes, especially when this leads to medical interventions on healthy children.  

Who and what the ‘Left’ is has become loose and ill-defined in recent years. In the podcast linked above Karen Stenner states that about a third of society has a tendency towards authoritarianism, roughly equal between left and right versions. I suspect there’s some overlap between left-wing authoritarians and those liberals that are at the extreme end for pushing novel social change – ie, modern progressives. Stenner describes how authoritarians, in contrast to traditional conservatives, are OK with large social change as long as it results in ‘oneness and sameness’. I think novel social change has become a fulcrum around which progressive authoritarians can identify comrades, people that will submit, and enemies. This combination of authoritarianism and an obsession with social novelty may help to understand modern progressives. Traditional left-wing ideas and language, or a narrative about what these are, are just cover for needs and motives that are much darker and toxic. 

Idea: The Left has been a victim of its own success. The most talented members of previously disadvantaged groups don’t need it anymore, so political activism on the Left has been taken over by average people 

Think of the women you know that are smart, confident, and energetic? Now imagine these women being expected to be submissive and told what role they are allowed to have in life. Sounds like they’d be trouble? And they were. Over the last century in the West, women fought for equal rights and they achieved this goal.  

An important thing to notice is the strength and depth there would have been in this movement. As above, just think of all the women who would be trouble if they were told what to do. There’s lots of them, no? So, we can imagine that at the beginning of the feminist movement there would have been a very large number of talented women to support it. But where are these women now? 

There are pursuing whatever individual interests they have. And this is where the problems begin for modern left-wing political activism. It was probably a frustration at not being allowed to pursue individual interests that was one of the motivating factors for early feminists. Without that barrier, one of the major reasons to be an active feminist is lost. This then has knock-on effects. I’ll use the example of a business woman. 

Women working within the world of business can be very time-pressured. Just the job itself can fill every hour of the day if they let it but then maintaining a normal personal life, family etc, will fill whatever time is left. Even if these women want to be involved in supporting feminist causes, there simply won't be enough time to give it the standard of input they’re capable of. This then allows less talented women to have more influence on feminist activism. And this is where the real problem begins. 

To perform well within any organisation, you need more than just academic type skills. That is, a good memory, ability to process complex information, etc. Emotional and social skills are essential. You can recognise people with this combination of skills when you meet them. They will be knowledgeable, rational, articulate, and socially skilled. The latter of these can present as funny, good at resolving conflicts, maybe even a little manipulative to achieve some goal. They will have a track record of performing in diverse, challenging environments. 

It follows that less talented people will present as uninformed, irrational, inarticulate, socially inept, and ineffectiveness at achieving whatever goals they have. To go back to the example of a successful businesswoman who might be interested in feminist activism. For someone that is intelligent and time-pressured, the motivation to be involved in activity that is controlled by people that aren’t performing at their own level is, I suspect, very discouraging. And, seeing as they are free to pursue their own individual interests anyway, why would they bother? 

This process may be at work across all areas of left-wing activism. For example, working class people now have equal opportunity, so trade union and left-wing party politics has lost access to its most talented members. Race and LGBT political activism will be affected by the same problems. Everywhere and every time left-wing activism opens doors for disadvantaged people to succeed, it reduces the human resources available to maintain the quality of that activism.  

This idea can also contribute to making sense of other aspects of modern left-wing politics. I’m essentially saying that progressive politics has been taken over by people that aren’t behaving intelligently, so what kind of thinking and behaviour do you find when people aren’t being smart? 

One of the key skills our brains have is to generalise information we’re exposed to. We categorise based on this. Apples and oranges become fruit, for example. It follows therefore that when people are being less intelligent their generalisations will be crude, and lack nuance and insight to deeper connections. One of the criticisms of modern progressive politics is that its focus on identity is regressive. That is, dividing people based on superficial characteristics such as race and gender etc misses what people have in common. Identity politics then could simply be average people framing social relations based on their limited ability to perceive commonalities between superficially diverse people.  

Another common criticism of modern left-wing politics is that it can be intolerant, hateful, and authoritarian, etc. When people are being less intelligent, they are more likely to experience fear and anger because the world will seem confusing, difficult to predict, and frustrating. So, is it any surprise that progressive politics has begun to reflect the emotions and behaviour found in people when they are being less intelligent? 

A seemingly obvious criticism of the idea in this post is that progressive politics is often associated with students and academics at universities, and people who in general are more ‘educated’ or ‘smart’. In fact, I think this gives insights into many other topics that I’ll discuss in other posts (one hint is that I describe people as ‘being’ less intelligent rather than they are less intelligent). For now, though, I'll leave this post here. I’ll be returning to this idea many times.