Links to Consider, 12/1

Rob Henderson on Age and Character; Conway's Law and Kling's Law; Razib Khan on powerful males; Noah Smith on anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S.

Rob Henderson writes,

the Dark Triad encompasses 3 distinct yet interrelated traits:

• Psychopathy, which is characterized by callousness and a profound disregard for others

• Narcissism, which is marked by an inflated sense of self-importance and entitlement

• And Machiavellianism which involves strategic exploitation and duplicity for personal gain

Study after study shows that these traits peak in the late teens and early twenties, and gradually decline with age.

In stark contrast, studies have found that older age coincides with the Light Triad personality traits, which encompass 3 factors:

First, Faith in Humanity, which reflects the belief that others are generally good and worthy of trust.

Second, Kantianism, which denotes the propensity to behave with integrity and honesty.

And lastly, Humanism, which involves a genuine appreciation for the successes of others.

A commenter mentioned Conway’s Law.

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.^[2][3]

— Melvin E. Conway

The law is based on the reasoning that in order for a product to function, the authors and designers of its component parts must communicate with each other in order to ensure compatibility between the components. Therefore, the technical structure of a system will reflect the social boundaries of the organizations that produced it, across which communication is more difficult. In colloquial terms, it means complex products end up "shaped like" the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for.

That law dates from 1967. In the early 1990s, I independently formulated a similar law: every organization gets the computer system it deserves.

My thinking was that rigid, rule-bound organizations ended up with reliable but difficult-to-change systems. Looser organizations ended up with more free-wheeling systems that often failed to preserve key information.

Managers who are better at abstract reasoning make better use of software than managers who are stuck in concrete ways of thinking. The great entrepreneurs of the 1950s knew how to build homes, hotels, and fast-food restaurants. They needed to manipulate physical materials. In 1994, when I was hoping to convince home builders to advertise on my web site, an industry expert warned me, “home builders know how to move dirt.” He thought I would have trouble communicating with them, and he was right.

To build a major business today, you need to be much more of an abstract thinker. It’s not unusual for a CEO nowadays to have a Ph.D (or to have dropped out of college by choice, not because he was intellectual challenged there).

Razib Khan writes,

In 2015, a paper, A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture …the authors report a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that for several centuries around 2000 BC one male was reproducing for every 17 females…

Economic historian and analyst of gender relations Alice Evans has pointed out that Eurasian pastoralism and nomadism is uniquely associated with patriarchy and patrilineal descent. While agricultural populations are mostly patrilineal, many are also matrilineal, like some of the ancient Scottish Picts, and others, like the Igbo of Nigeria, are bilineal. In contrast, pastoralist nomads seem to be exclusively patrilineal, possibly due to the role of men as critical herders who control almost all the wealth of these mobile societies. Mythologists who analyzed early Indo-European religion, whether that of the Greeks, Indians or Germans, noted the patriarchal presuppositions of their traditions, and the universal esteem paid to the sky father in their earliest legends. But this is not limited to the Indo-Europeans, the Turks and Mongols both worshipped Tengri, the personification of the creator sky god. The ecological impact of the steppe and nomadism left an imprint on all its peoples.

…Our evolved human instinct toward equality eventually overcame the steppe’s radically unequal winner-take-all ethos, but only via a newer, even more exotic cultural tool, that of philosophical religions preaching the inherent value and worth of even the weak and the humble. Millions may descend from Genghis Khan, but billions bow to Jesus, Muhammad and the Buddha, whose enduring bequests are ideas and ethics. This means the phenomenon of star phylogenies may have finally been snuffed out in our species, one of the last visible instances being Genghis Khan himself.

Noah Smith writes,

America is not Europe. Our Muslim population is small and tends to be high-skilled. Feelings toward Muslims have warmed substantially from the War on Terror era, and Islamophobia is deeply unpopular. Violent pro-Palestinian rallies in the U.S. are more likely to be blamed — correctly on non-Muslim leftists. And on top of all that, America’s anti-immigration turn came long before the Israel-Gaza conflict. So it’s a mistake to draw a connection between the European anti-immigration backlash and the American one.

…I see myself as a different kind of immigration advocate — I want sustainable immigration, which means that we need a system that doesn’t cause a restrictionist backlash. Currently, our system is causing a backlash, so I want to fix it, so that America’s fundamental pro-immigration attitude can shine through.

In a sane political environment, this approach would prevail.

substacks referenced above:

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Americans are angry about immigration

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Genghis Khan: they don’t make stars like they used to

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The More Days You Live, The More Things You Know