It's common sense that competitive team sports are one of the best ways to become a better person, even if you're not participating yourself. It's even more beneficial to compete, though. I had been thinking about the specific mechanisms of how something playing on an amateur football team makes you a better person, and I think one of the most important ones is that it forces you to boost your social skills. You've got a team who need to work together to achieve a goal and overcome others in a competition. The team needs to be motivated, but there's no money and not much glory to provide that motivation. That makes leadership a challenge. You can't just yell and people, curse and threaten to fire them the way you could on a construction site or at a warehouse job. You gotta be good.

If you just plain don't like sports, you can get the same benefits in other settings. Any situation where long-term teamwork is necessary and money isn't much of a motivator will suffice. Playing in a bar band is another example - there's some money to be had but not much, and you have to keep the team happy and motivated with other incentives. Even if you're not the leader, you will learn a lot just by observing the ways in which people try to give others incentives to do a good job. If you're really lacking in social skills, you might even have to use your brain and consciously try to analyze these transactions the way someone like Roissy analyzes picking up chicks, but you should still benefit trememdously. Here is an example of a non-financial transaction serving as an incentive: if you do your job well you will be more liked and respected by your bandmates, meaning the pianist will invite you to his parties where there are plenty of women you can hit on.

In one way, playing in a band with crap pay or being a lousy amateur footballer is better for you as a person than being a well-paid pro.

Alex writes that "the real virus with libertarianism is tragedy of the commons". Nah. The real problem with libertarianism is the kind of people it appeals to. C. Van Carter put it best when he wrote that "libertarianism is applied autism", but if you need it spelled out in more detail, here's Kathy Shaidle:

Most libertarians I've met are twitchy overgrown adolescents who are one step up from Trekkers on the appealing personality scale. They are curt, bitchy, brittle and huffy. When you're around a libertarian, it's always Thanksgiving dinner and they're the teenaged cousin with the giant anime collection who's read one book too few and stays coiled in his chair, waiting to blurt out some "shocking" comment he thinks is ahead of its time but is actually two hundred years old, in a boorish, loudmouth Penn Gillette way.

I just don't like them. They bug me.

It doesn't matter if libertarians are right about freedom, Austrian economics, and everything else. Neither they nor their ideas will ever have any influence or power anyway. Even people who agree with them will resist joining them, and there's always the sneaking suspicion that unhappy people with below-average social skills are inaccurate in their understanding other people and society... so you can't really trust their advice, can you?

Watch the below rap video on the subject of economics, ideally with the sound off. It's the reason I got to thinking about all this.

The Hayek character has no confidence and no swagger, and he ain't much to look at, either. Girls aren't into him. Maybe the real F.A. Hayek was like that, and the real John Maynard Keynes was a handsome ladies' man, I don't know. But do you really have to make it that painfully obvious in your propaganda video? Especially considering this is rap which has no use for losers, values swagger and allows a lot more blatant self-aggrandizement than other music genres (probably the main reason why I love working in the hip-hop scene - I don't have to be subtle). A lot of money went into this video, and it's done quite well, but that money is pretty much wasted because "we are a bunch of losers with sound arguments" is not a good message to send to anyone except, well, losers.

With Christmas finally here, many of us are going to spend a lot of time talking to many relatives we haven't seen in a while. Then on New Year's Eve we're going to spend a lot of time hitting on everybody else's girlfriends at the party, or whatever it is you do. That's a lot of conversations with people with whom you may have little in common. Here is one way of finding common ground in a difficult subject.

Guys generally have a hard time explaining guy hobbies to women. No matter whether you're doing the explaining or being poorly explained to, it helps to generalize the subject and describe it as guys competing for status. For example, here's how I managed to explain fantasy football to a couple of women.

I start off with the idea that guys like to argue about sports and try to prove who knows the most about sports. Those arguments are difficult to actually settle, though, so there is rarely a clear winner and loser. Fantasy football gives us a way to actually quantify the "Rooney or Drogba" argument and find a winner there, plus it also requires some knowledge of obscure players who are cheap. It basically lets guys prove who actually knows more about sports, and winning your mini-league makes you more respected and important in your circle of friends.

Women will generally roll their eyes and think "wow, guys sure are stupid", but they'll understand what it's about. They'll also think you must be very smart and perceptive if you can explain guy stuff in a way that they get. Sure, it's a vast simplification (you don't want to explain that being good at math is just as important as understanding the players' skills) and a lot of guy stuff is not only about competition, but even fishing and hunting contain a large element of showing other guys you're better than them. Some other things guys do are, of course, about showing women you're better than other guys, but women don't generally need that explained to them.

Of course "guy stuff" doesn't include male-dominated nerd activities, whether it's reenacting medieval combat or watching science fiction movies. That's nerd stuff, not guy stuff, and there is no good explanation for it.

Bruce G. Charlton provides a great explanation why intelligent people don't just have stupid ideas sometimes, they are making all-out war against common sense and normalcy. You should read the whole thing, but here is a short summary from the conclusion:

Because evolved ‘common sense’ usually produces the right answers in the social domain, yet the most intelligent people have personalities which over-use abstract analysis in the social domain, this implies that the most intelligent people are predisposed to have silly ideas and to behave maladaptively when it comes to solving social problems.

Ever since the development of cognitive stratification in modernizing societies, the clever sillies have been almost monopolistically ‘in charge’. They really are both clever and silly – but the cleverness is abstract while the silliness is focused on the psychological and social domains. Consequently, the fatal flaw of modern ruling elites lies in their lack of common sense – especially the misinterpretations of human psychology and socio-political affairs. My guess is that this lack of common sense is intrinsic and incorrigible – and perhaps biologically-linked with the evolution of high intelligence and the rise of modernity.

What can we do? Well, we vastly outnumber and outgun our cognitive elites, so if we wanted to it wouldn't be all that difficult to just remove them from power and/or kill them all (in a reversal of the typical misanthropic eugenicist's calls to kill everyone with an IQ lower than himself), but I wouldn't really recommend that. I'm not sure who originally said this, but if you think sociology professors have crazy ideas about the world, try talking to someone who dropped out of eighth grade. Putting average or stupid people in charge would be an improvement in many areas, but not all and might actually be a net loss. Besides, we already tried killing millions of people in order to make the world a better place already, and that didn't work out too well. So what other options remain? Convincing really smart people to pay more attention to everyone else's ideas is a pretty hopeless task, as Udolpho points out in his commentary on Charlton's post:

Here we find the hubris of the educated (in some cases over-educated) man: because his reasoning powers have gifted him with status and prestige, it is unthinkably humbling to suggest to him that his ideas in other spheres (notably politics) are inferior to those of the common individual far below him in status and measurable intelligence. How can a man who only follows his own dumb instincts, who can barely talk or write effectively, come up with a better conception of society than an academic or pundit who is respected by his equally intelligent peers! (In fact we find this hubristic force at work among elites who are far from demonstrating a particularly high cognitive ability, notably actors and musicians.)

I'm not gonna try to come up with any grand schemes to try to fix the world, but an older Udolpho post about how loathsome computer geeks are reminded me of something that each of us can do in our daily lives.

Our cognitive elites are basically nerds on a larger scale. Even the ones who aren't nerdy in their private lives - most of the people who succeed in politics, business etc. have both high IQ and good social skills, and quite a few even had good athletic ability in their youth - basically engage in the worst nerd behavior of substituting thinking (which they are good at) for the normal social instincts which they lack. While the nerd merely irritates those near him (especially single women), though, our masters impose their nonsensical and harmful ideas upon the world.

My proposed solution is to mock and humiliate nerds at every opportunity. By relentlessly picking on nerds we can stigmatize the overuse of abstract reasoning for situations where it doesn't work well. If we do this enough, the perceived worth of reasoning powers will decline and the status of common sense will rise. At some point even really smart people will be less ashamed to follow what little common sense instincts they have instead of suppressing them with brainpower. There's no risk that the elites will fight back, either - no one likes nerds except for other nerds, after all, so no one will rise to their defense.

So, pick on a nerd today! It'll be a tiny step towards a better world.

Alex forwarded me this link about existential depression in highly intelligent children:

It has been my experience that gifted and talented persons are more likely to experience a type of depression referred to as existential depression. Although an episode of existential depression may be precipitated in anyone by a major loss or the threat of a loss which highlights the transient nature of life, persons of higher intellectual ability are more prone to experience existential depression spontaneously. Sometimes this existential depression is tied into the positive disintegration experience referred to by Dabrowski (1996).

Existential depression is a depression that arises when an individual confronts certain basic issues of existence. Yalom (1980) describes four such issues (or "ultimate concerns")--death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. Death is an inevitable occurrence. Freedom, in an existential sense, refers to the absence of external structure. That is, humans do not enter a world which is inherently structured. We must give the world a structure which we ourselves create. Isolation recognizes that no matter how close we become to another person, a gap always remains, and we are nonetheless alone. Meaninglessness stems from the first three. If we must die, if we construct our own world, and if each of us is ultimately alone, then what meaning does life have?

Why should such existential concerns occur disproportionately among gifted persons? Partially, it is because substantial thought and reflection must occur to even consider such notions, rather than simply focusing on superficial day-to-day aspects of life. Other more specific characteristics of gifted children are important predisposers as well.

This is not just a bunch whiny crap, it's also a really bad misdirection of resources. More intelligent people are significantly less likely to be deperessed, period. They have it easier in life, especially in our cognitively demanding modern world. If intelligent people in a certain age group are more likely to suffer a certain specific type of depression, so fucking what? They're less likely to suffer other types of depression which more than makes up the difference.

I hate this kind of "smart kids need extra help" shit. No they fucking don't. They're smart - they need less help. Really stupid kids are the ones who need help and will still need help in 60 years when they're stupid old people. Only spoiled brats who've always gone to elite schools and never had a manual labor job could think otherwise because they've been pretty well isolated from truly dim-witted people whose lives really are a struggle.

Our world is far too full of government agencies and NGOs which want to nanny us and setting up more dedicated specifically to nannying the more intelligent among us is just pure bullshit. It makes about as much sense as dedicating your life to seeking donations to help athletic guys get laid because we are more likely to intimidate women. Please stop creating organizations whose sole purpose is to make the lives of those who already have easier and more pleasant lives even easier.