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Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley
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Suscoll (@susiemmurdoch) shared
In some sense, getting input from a broad variety of people is like getting input from a wide variety of devices—microscopes, telescopes, litmus paper, tensile testors, ultrasound devices, and weighing scales. There is indeed a shared physical reality out there; but for complex problems, no single one of us—experts included—has the all-encompassing set of tools or ways of perceiving that are necessary to truly understand its every aspect.
Note: each of us is limited
7 months ago
Suscoll
Jason (@jasonrtippitt) shared
“There are two ways to rise to the top,” says my business executive husband, with his hypersensitive bullshit detector. “One is to be the cream. The other is to be the scum.”
Note: See also American politics.
8 months ago
Jason
Jason (@jasonrtippitt) shared
If we are more like an ecosystem than a single species, then human cultural and behavioral diversity can be understood in the same way as biological diversity. We have not escaped evolution, as so commonly assumed. We experience evolution in hyperdrive.
Note: Think I found my book for the road today.
8 months ago
Jason
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Highlights



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Recent research has even undermined the long-held belief that troubled, argumentative marriages cause problematic behavior in the children brought up in those households. A recent study of adult twins and their offspring revealed that it is not the family discord that causes problematic behavior but rather the genes that troubled parents pass along. In fact, the parents’ own genes apparently determine how often they argue with each other.3Read more at location 767

Note: Wow - that is kind of fascinating Edit

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“In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, ‘Let there be Light.’ And there was still nothing. But you could see it.” —AnonymousRead more at location 1177

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Fig. 4.2. This cross section d monstrates some of the br in’s internal structures. The amygdala and hippocampus are actually locate deep within the brain ut are shown as an overla in the approximate areas that they are locate .Read more at location 1221

Note: Proffreadimg is underapprecated LOL Edit

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Altruism, it seems, may be founded on our understanding that others have motivations and actions that are similar to our own.Read more at location 1332

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“The psychopath is the kind of individual that can give you the right impression, has a charming facade, can look and sound like the ideal leader, but behind this mask has a dark side. It’s this dark side of the personality that lies, is deceitful, is manipulative, that bullies other people, that promotes fraud in the organization and steals the company’s money.”Read more at location 1421

Note: Interesting. Sounds a bit like our President Edit

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I wonder what Carolyn would think of my looking through her things. Through the dark gray comes a trembling flash of white, followed instantly by a rifle crack of thunder. The cupboard doors bounce; the fluorescents quiver. I’m left momentarily in darkness. Hi Carolyn.Read more at location 1454

Note: Lovely prose to set the scene Edit

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Role absorption—the tendency to define oneself in terms of a single role, label, or reference group. The person’s identity seems to revolve around a “cause” or shifting causes, and the person tends to define himself in terms of a label that provides a sense of identity.Read more at location 2118

Note: I wasjust describing someone that way a few days ago... Edit

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Those who grow up speaking Chinese, for example, process mathematics in different areas of the brain than those who grow up speaking English as their first language. Both groups use the inferior parietal cortex, but Chinese speakers also use a visual processing area, while English speakers use a language processing area. Richard E. Nisbett, codirector of the University of Michigan’s Culture and Cognition Program, notes that studies involving this type of phenomena are important because they tell us “something about the particular pathways in the brain that underlie some of the differences between Asians and Westerners in thought patterns.”3 Other studies have shown that gyri in the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes develop differently in Chinese speakers than in English speakers—acquisition of a different language appears to cause actual anatomical differences in the brain.4 Chinese speakers, in fact, literally see the world differently than English speakers—eye-tracking studies show that English speakers tend to first focus on individual items in the foreground of the picture, while Chinese speakers tend to first take in the background and the picture as a whole.5Read more at location 2399

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James Surowiecki, in his superlative The Wisdom of Crowds, drives home his counterintuitive thesis that multiple viewpoints from individuals with a wide range of backgrounds, rather than the restricted viewpoints of experts or specialists, are crucial in reaching informed decisions on complex topics.Read more at location 2413

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In fact, experts receive such similar training that occasionally they can be unaware, as a group, of shared inadequacies in their approach.Read more at location 2419

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If you’ve been raised from childhood to think a certain way about things like the greatness of Mother Russia and the Soviet Union, if you’ve had a one-sided education about the superiority of communism and the evils of Western decadence, a few conversations with a foreigner to the contrary won’t amount to a hill of beans of difference.Read more at location 2449

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I’d learned one of the most valuable lessons I would ever learn—that deep-rooted emotional reasoning can often trump logic.Read more at location 2454

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Machiavellians such as Coleman often take advantage of an emotionally based—perhaps even genetically predisposed—desire on the part of some honest individuals to believe that others are also honest. This can occur despite sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary.Read more at location 2583

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Such government-mandated programs as busing and the projects, often generated by emote control related to genuinely altruistic considerations, have wasted billions of taxpayers’ dollars and led to a worsening of the very conditions they were meant to solve.Read more at location 2625

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Me-first Milosevic-like Machiavellians, with their convincing masks of integrity and charm, climb in every social hierarchy, schmooze in every community, saunter through every neighborhood. Whether we care about children, students, families, factory workers, fellow followers of Christ, brothers in Islam, blacks, whites, Mongolians, or Democratic or Republican political planks, the successfully sinister have no compunction about using our best intentions to further their own purposes—and themselves. By believing a heartbreaking speech about how important it is for us to be treated “fairly,” or a tale of how we’ve been victimized, or a plea to put our hearts and minds toward helping others, we may be doing our tiny part to stoke the fires and empower a Machiavellian.Read more at location 2641

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One day, according to Mao, father and son had a row in front of guests. “My father scolded me before them, calling me lazy and useless. This infuriated me. I called him names and left the house. . . . My father . . . pursued me, cursing me as well as commanding me to come back. I reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if he came any nearer. . . . My father backed down.”Read more at location 3013

Note: How much better might the world be if he had jumped Edit

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One of Mao’s favored mechanisms for eliciting purge victims was to urge people to speak out, pledging there would be no retribution. The worst of these deathly false promises occurred in April of 1956, when Mao called for intellectual debate under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.”Naive intellectuals, encouraged by signs of liberalization, climbed aboard and began criticizing the party. Privately, Mao told party cadres, “This is not setting an ambush for the enemy, but rather letting them fall into the snare of their own accord.”69 After allowing for several months of seeming freedom, Mao cracked down. Quotas ranging between 1 and 10 percent were set of intellectuals to be persecuted and purged. Many who had said nothing were pulled in just to fill Mao’s quotas. Mao bragged that one province, Hunan, “denounced 100,000, arrested 10,000, and killed 1,000. The other provinces did the same. So our problems were solved.”70 Mao’s Boswell, Dr. Li, remarked on how, although Mao accused others of creating conspiracies, he was the “greatest manipulator of all.”71Read more at location 3312

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Mao also deliberately chose an influential American journalist, Edgar Snow, who wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune, to charm for the Western world. Snow swallowed Mao’s fabrications wholesale, calling Mao and other party leaders “direct, frank, simple, undevious.”83 Mao’s journalistic charm campaign had long-term payoffs for both Snow and Mao. Other prominent figures joined Snow in praising Mao and his regime. Harvard professor John K. Fairbank “returned from a visit to China and remarked: ‘The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in centuries.’ Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir excused Mao’s murderous regime by arguing that ‘the power [he] exercises is no more dictatorial than, say, Roosevelt’s was.’ Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir’s consort, celebrated Mao’s ‘revolutionary violence,’ declaring it to be ‘profoundly moral.’”84Read more at location 3373

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But Mao and the Communists’ ability to fool the press extended further, in unexpected ways. Because the Nationalists had a much freer press, where frank complaint and discussion could take place, the Nationalists’ own atrocities and blunders were magnified in people’s minds. The contrast with the carefully controlled positive press coming from the Communist camp allowed many people to come to the conclusion that the Communists were the lesser of two evils. Nationalist captain Hsu Chen provides one example of an individual who had witnessed the terrors of Communist rule firsthand, becoming strongly anticommunist as a result. Coming home to Ningbo, near Shanghai, he found that people were in denial and did not want to hear his views: “I talked to every visitor, til my tongue dried up and my lips cracked . . . I told them about the heartless and bestial deeds of the Communist bandits. . . . But I was unable to wake them up from their dreams, but rather aroused their aversion.”85Read more at location 3380

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After more than a quarter of a century of Mao’s rule, seventy million Chinese died needlessly, often gruesomely, at his behest. China’s economy was in shambles; its agriculture based on inefficient, back-breaking hand toil; its industrial base worthless, turning out heaps of defective equipment. As a military power, China’s only claim to fame was a multitude of warm bodies; there were entire fleets of planes that could not fly and a navy that could barely navigate the seas.Read more at location 3486

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He was aided by a society in turmoil as well as by often inept opposition. And he was given cover by an unchecked Communist political party that gained followers through its unabashed idealism and ability to provide the poor and working classes revenge against those they worked for, owed money to, or were simply jealous of.Read more at location 3514

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But the essential idea she reviewed and synthesized is unchanged—that is, congenitally deceptive individuals—cheaters— can thrive and reproduce in society. How much these cheaters succeed depends on how many of them there are. If their numbers are tiny, they can easily find victims to dupe, and so they thrive. If their numbers grow large, however, the surrounding population grows more wary. In this more savvy population, it’s harder to find a gullible target, and so the duplicitous have a more difficult time being successful—and being able to reproduce successfully. Thus there are fewer cheaters in the subsequent generation. And so it goes in a seesaw of counterbalancing activities, much like a predator-prey relationship.Read more at location 3588

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In straightforward fashion, it shows how successful seemingly irrational emotional strategies can be. For example, if you are known for losing it when hearing something you don’t want to hear, or being ruthlessly vindictive when crossed, or going on the attack at even the slightest of imagined provocations, you’ve essentially torn off your steering wheel in front of those around you. Your own seemingly irrational behavior can work as a completely rational strategy for getting your own way. The only rule for such a strategy to be effective is that you must be known to have torn off your steering wheel. To truly coerce others into steering clear, your ruthlessness and combative nature should be complete and obvious—you must be regarded as being willing to pursue utterly vindictive strategies regardless of the consequences.Read more at location 3666

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As in Churchill’s case, will history prove correct those who now see similar menace in the Machiavellians who have found purchase in fundamentalist Islam? Will well-intentioned policies of cultural relativism, in the long run, prove equivalent to Chamberlain’s similarly benign, seemingly rational, and humane policies of appeasement—policies that led willy-nilly to genocide?Read more at location 4371

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George Washington, for one, was highly respected and effective in large part because he was a supreme realist, “temperamentally incapable of tilting at wind-mills or living by illusion” and carrying an “instinctive aversion to sentimentalism and all moralistic brands of idealism.”75 Washington, Ellis reminds us, was “that rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary. . . . His genius was his judgment.”76 Perhaps surprisingly, Ellis cites as the cause of Washington’s judgment his lack of schooling—his “mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions.”Read more at location 4377

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While these ultimately evil dictators voraciously absorbed the idealistic teachings of Marx, which they then used to mask for their self-interested behavior, Washington was busy bringing himself to the opposite conclusion that “men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals.”77 Ideology, it seems, whether liberal, conservative, Communist, capitalist, or religious, is often seized by people of certain temperaments, for their own purposes, whether for good or for ill.Read more at location 4383

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Charismatic, straight-from-the-heart speeches are easier for someone who doesn’t necessarily need to look down at papers or slightly askew at teleprompters for reminders.Read more at location 4475

Note: Good advice for candidates (& our president) Edit

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Indeed, it’s difficult for many people to understand how emergenically different the successfully sinister can be—we just can’t believe these people can be that different from us. Historian Robert Waite describes the wonderful impression Hitler made on others: “To the sophisticated French ambassador, he appeared as ‘a well-balanced man, filled with experience and wisdom.’ An intellectual found him ‘charming,’ a person with ‘common sense’ in the English sense. The British historian Arnold Toynbee came away from an interview thoroughly ‘convinced of his sincerity in desiring peace.’ The elegant and precise Anthony Eden was impressed by Hitler’s ‘smart, almost elegant appearance’ and found his command of diplomatic detail ‘masterful.’”Read more at location 4504

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President Jimmy Carter, arguably a decent man, befriended and feted Nicolae Ceausescu, handing a propaganda coup to one of the world’s nastiest dictators. Carter has also made a post-presidential habit of being conned: befriending career terrorist Yasir Arafat, singing the praises of brutal North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, and certifying as fair and aboveboard many a questionable third world election.Read more at location 4516

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60 Minutes stalwart Mike Wallace was charmed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the deeply fanatical president of Iran, effusively describing him as “very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way . . . infinitely more rational than I had expected him to be.”102 Wallace had been similarly obsequious with Syrian tyrant Hafez Assad as well as the deeply Machiavellian Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, prompting journalist David Bar-Ilan to note: “Had [Wallace] treated American . . . politicians this way, he would have been drummed out of the profession.”103 Naivete about people’s motives, especially from well-known figures, often allows Machiavellians a public stage to work their confusing, deceptive wiles. But sometimes, Machiavellians achieve this publicity by covertly appealing to their interlocutor’s narcissism rather than naivete. When mediators and interviewers interact with a well-known sinister character and bring out the seeming best in him, it provides an opportunity to flaunt their own character: “See. He may seem evil, but he’s really not so bad. At least not to intelligent, nice, right-thinking people like me. The guy’s just a pussycat when I talk to him.”Read more at location 4524

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In an ironic twist of justice, it appears that the worst of all human crimes—genocide—often occurs simply because people can’t believe that heretofore noncriminal humans can perpetrate horrendous acts such as mass murder or gratuitous torture. “I don’t believe you,” said Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, when told by an eyewitness of the “naked corpses in the Warsaw ghetto, yellow stars, starving children, Jew hunts, and the smell of burning flesh.” Frankfurter interrupted to add: “I do not mean you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.”109 The justice literally could not conceive of the atrocities being described. Samantha Power describes one of the key causes of genocide in her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Problem from Hell”: “Despite graphic media coverage, American policymakers, journalists, and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil. Ahead of the killings, they assume rational actors will not inflict seemingly gratuitous violence. They trust in good-faith negotiations and traditional diplomacy.”110 Sadly, ordinary people often have little exposure to the research regarding Machiavellians that could do much to help prevent genocide. Only by recognizing Machiavellians for what they are and how they operate can we begin to stop them.Read more at location 4584

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Both high-tech neuroscience and Carolyn’s old-fashioned journal entries have helped me to realize that Carolyn, and people like her, often don’t consciously intend to be evil and certainly don’t see themselves as evil—despite the blindingly obvious and sometimes terrible consequences of their actions. Instead, these are people who are constrained by the quirks of their neural machinery—often carved by both genes and environment—to act in self-serving, manipulative, and deceitful ways. Evil though the consequences of their actions may be, such Machiavellians are still real people, not caricatures—they can become heartbreakingly lonely, monumentally sad, and their eyes can become filled with tears of pity—even if it is only self-pity.Read more at location 4740

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Machiavellians can have an incalculably restrictive, demoralizing, and corrupt effect on those in their sphere of influence. But what is worse is that Machiavellian behavior in a family, company, religious institution, school, union, or governmental unit—in fact, in virtually any social group—often seems to reach awe-inspiring proportions before anyone feels compelled to take solid action.aq22 Many people simply prefer to go about their everyday lives rather than take up a righteous cause; it is often much easier to simply ignore, evade, justify, or silence the speech of anyone who does speak out than to constructively act against unsavory activities.Read more at location 4775

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All of these factors serve to keep a stable sinister system intact, despite the fact that such a system is often less effective than other, more open systems that make more effective use of the “wisdom of crowds.” (Machiavellians, in fact, often work behind the scenes to ensure their system is not put in a position of competing with other systems.) Opaque organizations, systems, and ideologies that easily allow for underhanded interactions play to Machiavellians’ strong suit, allowing them to conceal their deceitful practices more easily. Idealistic systems such as communism and some religious or quasi-religious creeds are perfect for Machiavellians because they often lack checks and balances, or don’t use them. When kindhearted people are unaware that a few leading individuals in “their group” are likely to be sinister, they are ripe for victimization. Their own kindness, in fact, is turned against them and others. Hitler’s greatest strength, for example, was his ability to appeal not only to the worst characteristic—hatred—but also to people’s best qualities—faith, hope, love, and sacrifice. As with most Machiavellians, he was a master at turning people’s best traits against them. “He confided the secret of his approach to an intimate: ‘When I appeal . . . for sacrifice, the first spark is struck. The humbler the people are, the greater the craving to identify themselves with a cause bigger than themselves.’”24 Such factors as political instability with no end in sight, worsening economic disaster, and rapid social changes have been pointed out as critical to the rise of successfully sinister dictators such as Hitler.25 In reality, what these factors appear to do is merely allow the successfully sinister—always loitering near the top of every significant social structure—to not only gain ascendancy but also to rewrite the rules. As power is consolidated, the sycophantic cocoon that a leading Machiavellian is able to encase himself in can, it seems, reinforce his own narcissistic thought patterns.Read more at location 4785

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