Marbury

men can empathise, but don't

In the past it's been found, in research, that women have a greater capacity for empathy than men. A new paper suggests this isn't exactly right...

The first study demonstrated that women’s advantage held only when women were given a task assessing their feelings of sympathy toward the target prior to performing the empathic accuracy task. The second study demonstrated that payments in exchange for accuracy improved the performance of both men and women and wiped out any difference between men’s and women’s performances. Together, the results suggest that gender differences in empathic accuracy performance are the result of motivational differences and are not due to simple differences of ability between men and women.

(Via Overcoming Bias)

politics

This is from a review of what sounds like a fascinating book:

"An unexpected result of my research on the mafia," (the author) writes, "was to find out that mafiosi are quite incompetent at doing anything" other than shaking down legitimate businesses and enforcing trade agreements among smaller-scale hoodlums. "Mafiosi are good at intimidation and stick to it.... They let the professionals and the entrepreneurs take care of the actual business operations."

Rather than getting involved in running a restaurant or dealing drugs, they joke about their cluelessness in such matters and simply collect payment for "protection." But this professed incompetence (evidently quite well-demonstrated on the rare occasions that a mafioso tries to go legit) makes them strangely trustworthy to those using their services: "If mobsters showed any competence at it, their clients would fear that they might just take over."

The book's author (Diego Gambetta) goes on to argue that something similar happens in the Italian academy: the most powerful figures in this system tend to be the least intellectually distinguished.

But why stop there...?

poetry and prose

David Brooks is back from his summer break with a column that manages to say something definitive about Ted Kennedy and also about the American way of governance, all in 600 words or whatever it is.

His point about Kennedy is that Teddy started off in the mould of his brothers: a charismatic hero who would bring change to America. This is how Americans like their presidents. Or it's how they imagine they like their presidents. After he failed at that (in 1980) Kennedy didn't just return to the sidelines and take up a comfortable purist-across-the-water position, carping at every compromise by Democrat leaders. He reinvented himself as the very essence of the principled compromiser - or as Brooks puts it, a gradualist - and a masterful deal-maker. In this way, not only did he "find himself" politically, he changed more lives for the better than most presidents. Brooks's larger point is that America's constitution is designed to reward this kind of approach. The Founders wanted Change to be hard. As the current president is finding out.

Brooks doesn't mention Obama, so I will. The kneejerk critique of Obama is that he's a charismatic hero-type who doesn't have the patience or subtlety to bring about real change. I don't think this is right. The paradoxical thing about Obama is that he's both. On the one hand he's undoubtedly charismatic and aims to be a transformative president, if such a thing is possible. On the other, he's something of a legislative nerd himself (albeit a rank amateur compared to Kennedy) who actually enjoys sweating the details of deals. After all, he's from Chicago, where every change is incremental and based on coalitions of interest. To his mind, Change will come, but it will come slowly. This health bill may get him 70% of what he wants. The rest can follow in four years. But you wait...

This is not a terribly exciting proposition and it wouldn't have made for a good campaign slogan ("Change. But In Increments!"). The issue, though, is one of expectation. His supporters, especially those on the left, don't want to wait. They believe in the president as a heroic leader, a white - or black - knight on the people's steed. They heard the call of Change and they demand it now, all of it.

Obama's biggest problem is reconciling two very different ideas of what a president is for. He needs the momentum, the friendly wind that comes from the belief that he can break the old politics. But he also needs to make the old politics work for him, and that means gradualism.

Kennedy's death, of course, is not just a personal loss to the president.

a home for the mature reprobate

Exciting news for (multi-millionaire) Ferris Bueller fans: Cameron's house is for sale.

Scroll down here to view some whizzy photographs of it.

(Hat tip: Hello Beautiful)

kneejerkers

I have a boring and vague truth-lies-in-between position on the decline or otherwise of educational standards but I did enjoy Alastair Campbell's characteristically robust rejoinder to the annual cry of "dumbing-down":

To those who have received good (GCSE) results, I say well done for all the hard work you put into it, and well done to your schools and teachers for managing to teach you well despite all the space in your lives that goes on social networking, fads, trends, clothes, and crap telly programmes.

And understand that the reason the media questioning of your success increases with every rise in standards is that the vast bulk of newspaper editors, columnists, commentators, broadcast executives and senior broadcasters send their own kids to private schools, and their coverage of State schools is slanted to justify their own choices.

When their kids do well, it's because they are good caring parents and their kids are jolly bright. When you do well, it is because of dumbing down. It is called snobbery. And nonsense.

john, bobby, ted

From a great collection of photographs of Ted Kennedy at Time.

becoming ted

Ted Kennedy during his 1980 campaign for president (Wally McNamee/Corbis)

Joe Klein has written a terrific sketch of Ted during the 1970s, reminding us of how long and how painful was his progress to political and personal maturity. Petrified by his brothers' legacy, ashamed of his screw-ups, Kennedy was dreadfully ill-at-ease when meeting voters, perpetually unsure whether he was going to be scorned or shot.

Sad, and funny too:

I watched him work a supermarket in New Bedford when he ran for re-election in 1976. He accompanied a woman who was shopping for her family. It was total agony. He simply had no idea what to say or do. "So, uh, your family, ah, likes ... meat?" he asked. "Oh, yes, Senator," the woman replied, and that was that. No question about the high price of chuck. He stared at her, unable to figure out what came next.

sexual confusion

Two somewhat connected snippets of science:

An interesting analysis of the Semenya case that explains why "sex testing" is more complex than you think (I wonder how much of the doubts raised about her are the result of nominative determinism, or rather what we might call - coining a phrase - nominative priming?)

And a fascinating case study (via the excellent Mind Hacks) of a female patient who had the experience of changing sex when she had a seizure:

The patient in question had a small tumour near the right amygdala and showed abnormal right temporal lobe activity on an EEG. Interestingly, when she had the experience of changing sex, she also experienced other females in the vicinity as transforming into males.

"a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end..."

Ted Kennedy RIP.

Daniel Finkelstein writes an excellent assessment, and wonders if Kennedy's death will help Obama pass healthcare - just as LBJ was able to pass civil rights legislation in part because of the outpouring of sympathy for Kennedy's older brother.

quote of the day

The Washington Post quotes John Dombrowski, director of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, on the subject of using Propofol as a sleeping aid:

"That'd be like me taking chemotherapy because I'm tired of shaving my head."

(Via The Daily Dish)

dept. of only in new york

A friend of mine writes that she has just been accosted on Spring Street by a woman wearing an Obama poster handing out Obama-branded condoms and singing "Obama condoms, for long and hard times."

obama reading list: gibbs nightmare version

Tory evildoer Daniel Hannan doesn't believe in Obama's reading list. He thinks it looks as if it's been concocted by a spin doctor - presumably Robert Gibbs.

Which got me thinking: what would the extreme opposite look like? What's the reading list that would cause Obama - or at least Gibbs - the most headaches?

Here's my suggestion. Feel free to construct your own.

- The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins.

- Easeful Death: Is There a Case For Assisted Dying? Warnock and Macdonald.

- Das Kapital, Karl Marx

- The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby

- The Koran

(Ps Alex Massie thinks Obama should be reading about cricket, which is nearly as bad as socialism.)

obama's summer reading

Here's a list of the books the president has taken to Martha's Vineyard:

- The Way Home by George Pelecanos
- Hot Flat and Crowded by Tom Friedman
- Lush Life by Richard Price
- Plainsong by Kent Haruf
- John Adams by David McCullough

How does it compare with Bill's? It's pretty similar actually. They don't actually overlap. But there's a sort of quality-middlebrow feel to both, a blend of fiction and non-fiction - they could be interchangeable. It's a pity: I was hoping for something ridiculously highbrow from Obama, just to wind up the Palin tendency.

If you want a really impressive reading list, look no further.

mars, venus, and planet saudi

It's an exciting time for science. Not only are we on the brink of a revolution in our understanding of reproduction, but now we have new insight into the differences between men and women, courtesy of a presenter on what seems to be Saudi Arabia's equivalent of CBeebies:

Hat tip: Comment Central

obama's toughest opponent

The New Yorker's James Surowiecki explains in more detail something I've touched on before: Obama is in a battle with human nature as much as he is with political opposition. To continue the card-playing analogies, he's running up against our deep-rooted instincts to stick rather than twist.  Surowiecki suggests an alternative communication strategy:

Changing the system so that individuals can get affordable health care, while banning bad behavior on the part of insurance companies, will actually make it more likely, not less, that people will get to preserve their current level of coverage. The message, in other words, should be: if we want to protect the status quo, we need to reform it.

And maybe Obama's 2012 slogan can be Stop Change!