Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Notes on Modularity, Value Pluralism, Cultural Variation, etc.

Re: Notes on Modularity, Value Pluralism, Cultural Variation, etc.

McClain — Mon, 09 May 2005 21:48:58 -0000

So crazies'n'druggies see what's real, but overlooked, maybe....
Different mental perception modules activated, different hot/cold mental bias.
Same reality.
Religious visionaries (like witch doctors, mediums...) as well?
It's a long-standing, nagging fear for many folks, I think.
The fear that THEY'RE NOT JUST CRAZY, IT'S NOT JUST THE DRUGS, etc.

Re: Notes on Modularity, Value Pluralism, Cultural Variation, etc.

bago — Sun, 08 May 2005 01:41:23 -0000

The nigh-inherent behavior patterns at a low level could always be described as emotional. Such patterns will be surfaced in an effective manner when given a darwinin survival of the fittest context. However, in the past 5 thousand years, we've gone meta, and in the past 200 it's gone meta to the extreme. There's a point where you realize this thing keeps going, and damn it's cool.

Data driven behaviors as side effects of emergent properties of competition and expansion make the general human quandry make so much more sense. Alpha types dominate because they have to, or else they will be destroyed by competition.

What we perceive as effective sucessful traits will always be outliers on any populational curve, because of the nature of competition.

Re: Notes on Modularity, Value Pluralism, Cultural Variation, etc.

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 05 May 2005 11:52:55 -0000

Sweet. Thanks, Brad. I hope to see you at the party tomorrow.

Re: Notes on Modularity, Value Pluralism, Cultural Variation, etc.

brad — Thu, 05 May 2005 11:36:24 -0000

Will, you might also check out Cass Sunstein's BBS article "Moral Heurestics". The preprint is here:
http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Sunstein-01102004/Referees/Sunstein.rev.pdf
Some of Jon Haidt's work might be of interest too, in particular "Intuitive Ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions Generate Culturally Variable Virtues". You can find it here: http://wsrv.clas.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/publications.html

Re: Notes on Modularity, Value Pluralism, Cultural Variation, etc.

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 05 May 2005 10:31:35 -0000

Thanks Chris! Awesome. I'll be looking it all up.

Re: Notes on Modularity, Value Pluralism, Cultural Variation, etc.

Chris — Thu, 05 May 2005 07:55:13 -0000

You might find interesting, and I guarantee you will find educational, some of the recent work on goal systems and valuation. While it doesn't really speak to modularity (most of the work assumes a domain-general goal system with learned domain-specific representations), it certainly speaks to how we reason about values, and how context and domain may effect that reasoning. Two papers in particular may serve as good starting points, as they present fairly extensive literature reviews along with theoretical discussion. They are:
Kruglanski, A. W., Shah, J. Y., Fishbach, A., Friedman, R., Chun, W. Y., & Sleeth-Keppler, D. (2002). A theory of goal systems. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 34, 331-378.

Markman, A.B., & Brendl, C.M. (in press). Goals, policies, preferences, and actions. To appear in F.R. Kardes, P.M. Herr, & J. Nantel (Eds.) Applying Social Cognition to Consumer-focused Strategy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

You might also find the now fairly extensive literature on protected values informative. It speaks more directly to the differences in the types of reasoning used for what we consider fungible and what we do not. The best place to start is with this paper:
Baron, J., & Spranca, M. (1997). Protected values. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 70(1), 1-16.

However, this paper is much more recent and has conclusions that may be more relevant to certain philosophical issues concerning moral reasoning:
Tanner, C. & Medin, D.L. (In Press). Protected values: No omission bias and no framing effects. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Re: Notes on Modularity, Value Pluralism, Cultural Variation, etc.

Christopher Monnier — Wed, 04 May 2005 18:06:28 -0000

Interesting bit about values...I've always thought that libertarians are generally more consistent in applying their principles than others. Democrats favor abortion rights because women "own their own body," but often favor smoking bans and anti-fat regulations. Republicans claim to favor limited government, but insist on regulating our thoughts and beliefs.

Maybe libertarians' minds are less modular...