Brain Food

A buffet of intellectual ideas you never knew you wanted to know.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition is for everyone, but if you want to support my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for just $4/month. I rely exclusively on reader support. Alternatively, you can support my work by picking up a copy of my award-winning book, FLUKE.

---

I: Confidence without Competence

The mark of a fool is one who is often wrong but never uncertain. And yet, at the highest echelons of social power, from business to politics, we frequently hand over control of our lives to overconfident blowhards, assured of their inimitable genius despite frequent evidence to the contrary (see, for example, Musk, Elon).

Nature, it seems, also has mechanisms to reward confidence that are detached from competence. Consider the cuddly meerkat, a beloved stalwart of the Kalahari desert. As foragers, they constantly make decisions about where to look for their next meal. And to do so, meerkats make “move calls,” vocalizations that indicate a preference to follow a particular route, venturing off in a fresh direction in the hopes of delicious, filling rewards.

But when meerkats gather together—officially called a meerkat “mob”—there are inevitably competing move calls. One meerkat wants to go north, another favors the south. Who rules the mob?

The answer, researchers have suggested, has little to do with meerkat competence. Instead, through a series of experiments, scientists have discovered that the mob seems to follow the most confident meerkat, the one who is making the most insistent move call. (By contrast, African wild dogs sneeze when they want the pack to go for a hunt. Unlike with meerkats, the social status of the sneezer always matters. If a dominant wild dog sneezes, then the pack will go on a hunt if just one or two other dogs sneeze in agreement. But for a subordinate dog to get its way, a chorus of around ten dogs must sneeze along).

Now, new research from the University of Kent has demonstrated how human social behaviors around confidence and social status are a rather unfortunate mixture of meerkats and wild dogs.

In a series of studies, they asked participants to make judgments that had objectively correct and incorrect answers. As the individuals tried to answer correctly within a group setting, the observed social interactions confirmed previous research, which frequently shows that more extraverted individuals tend to also be more socially dominant, giving them a better chance of rising up the human social hierarchy. Additionally, they found that men tended to answer substantially more swiftly than women, another hallmark of overconfidence.

But the crucial finding—one that confirms what many people probably already suspect—is that there was precisely zero correlation between confidence and competence. In other words, those who were confident and swift in their answers were equally good or bad at accurately answering objective questions than those who expressed less confidence.

This finding reflects a profoundly disturbing feature of our social relationships. We tend to reward the wrong trait—confidence—when conferring power, even though we should be rewarding competence.

Will we ever learn, or are we doomed to be beholden to the overconfident meerkats among us, who will happily lead us into the oblivion of the mob?

II: Tired of dating apps? Try the sexy dance moves of the peacock spider

Next time you’re out on a successful date, spare a thought for the romantically scorned animals of the world. Many of them, motivated by an intense, visceral desire to procreate and pass their genes to the next generation, devote an extraordinary amount of energy to courtship, only to find themselves shunned by a more magnificent rival specimen of, say, octopus or porcupine. (Thankfully, there is no known evidence—yet—that purveyors of failed courtship rituals in the animal kingdom end up becoming incels).

Evolution has delivered us the most astonishing menagerie of mating behaviors to observe in our fellow metazoans. It is, I believe, a worthwhile endeavor to examine some of the weirder manifestations of courtship in our distant cousins. Why? For the rather good reason that it’s astoundingly interesting and charmingly bizarre and I ask you, dear reader, what better reason is there to have your neurons gleefully fire with rapt attention than that?

Consider, for example, the regrettable blunder that you have most likely, in your long stretch of conscious existence, devoted precisely zero of your brain cells to celebrating the sexy dance moves of peacock spiders.

A crippling error in judgment, yes, but one that is easily corrected because you have wisely signed up to have my brain thoughts beamed into your inbox, and I will now rescue you from your erroneous ways.

Behold! I give you: the dancing peacock spider:

Now, if you find yourself lonely and single and tired with the digital dystopia of dating apps, or simply want to spice up your existing romance, perhaps you might take a sultry page from these clever arachnids.

Here’s how:

First, attach an extra leg to your cephalothorax and begin to clap that leg with one of your other ones to attract a potential mate’s attention.

Second, affix an enormous multicolored fan-like protrusion to your read-end—the more colorful the better. (Do you really want to be outdone by some guy named Bruce who went all out on the tie-dye when you only half-assed it?)¹

Next—and this is the crucial bit—turn yourself into the most irresistible, sexiest creature alive (that you know, deep down, you are) as you begin to seductively vibrate your abdomen. Don’t be shy. You may use one of three vibrations (and I recommend an experimental approach to see how the prospective mate replies to each before doubling down on any one of them), but these are formally known as the rumble rump, the crunch roll, and the grind revs. Now is the time to enthusiastically shake your abdominal fan-flaps.

I don’t want to be overly prescriptive here, but I do want to highlight some potentially useful empirical evidence: “Males who put forth more effort in both the visual display and the vibratory signaling had a higher success in mating.”

We have now reached a crucial moment in your seduction strategy. Carefully watch your prospective mate to see if she signals her interest in your dancing by waggling her third pair of legs. If she does not, back off!

This is the bit of this edition where you are rewarded for reading carefully rather than skimming, because if your prospective mate—be it on dating apps, or through attempted abdomen vibrating in your nearest nightclub—does not signal to you with her third pair of legs, then you will likely die, because she will attack and eat you. (Surely this critical lifesaving warning is worth the cost of a very reasonably priced paid subscription alone, as it is most certainly news you can use).

However, if you find yourself rejected and about to be eaten, despair not. Your only viable strategy, other than succumbing to the cold inevitability of death, is to jump away. Thankfully, if you channel your inner peacock spider, you can then jump roughly 40 times higher than your body length, which would be equivalent to LeBron James being able to jump 270 feet (a fact that puts his puny 44 inch vertical in rather pathetic comparative perspective).

If, however, you observe that your prospective mate warmly beckons you with the old yoo-hoo from her third pair of legs, then congratulations! You may now proceed—depending on your personal acumen and endurance in this realm—to copulate for a period of “several minutes to an hour or more.”

While I cannot personally vouch for the effectiveness of the peacock spider rumble rump, it does seem far preferable to other forms of elaborate animal courtship. For example, despite a generous legal protection fund for writers on Substack, I would neither endorse nor ever condone drawing a page from the porcupine playbook even if you are deeply lonely.

These adorably spiky creatures first have a bit of a violent battle royale to determine which male can approach the female, at which point the victorious porcupine will follow the female for days, ready to act whenever he senses that she has entered her eight hour fertility window.

At that point, the “male will lurch toward her with an erect penis and spray her with urine. If she’s not yet in heat, the female porcupine will respond by screaming and running away.” (Similarly, I do not recommend following the strategy of the male argonaut octopus, who, like a less romantic cephalopod Romeo, detaches one of his tentacles—which conveniently doubles as a penis—and shoots it at the waiting female, at which point he abruptly dies).

If you would like to take alternative cues from the natural world on how best to find the right partner, perhaps you will find the answers you seek here or here.

III: The American Outlier of Intergenerational Poverty

Intergenerational poverty—in which those who are born poor stay poor throughout their lives—is an obvious blight on society. Its persistence also flies in the face of many meritocratic myths about poverty being purely a reflection of limited talents and poor choices rather than structural and social factors.

But how persistent is intergenerational poverty? And which countries are best—and worst—at tackling it?

Recently published research in Nature set out to answer that exact question, with a comparison between the United States, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Denmark. This design allowed the researchers to examine differential rates of intergenerational poverty among five rich democracies that are ostensibly peer nations.

The findings are brutal reading for the United States. As the researchers explain:

“We found that the United States has a much stronger intergenerational poverty than the four other high-income countries examined. Spending all of one’s childhood in poverty in the United States is associated with a 42 percentage point increase in the mean poverty rate during early adulthood. This is more than four times stronger than in Denmark and more than twice as strong as in Australia or the United Kingdom.”

Crucially, though, through a series of clever research methods, they were able to identify the key drivers of the variation between these countries. And, as they point out, the biggest factor that makes the United States an outlier is tied to government policy around taxes and the social safety net. Using sophisticated modelling, they were able to demonstrate that “if the United States were to adopt the tax and transfer insurance effects of its peer countries, its intergenerational poverty persistence could decrease by more than one-third.”

This is the kind of social research that deserves more attention; it’s solid evidence that the persistence of intergenerational poverty is, to a large extent, a policy choice. That’s depressing, of course, but it’s also a call to action: these are the stakes of politics.

The governance choices we make have enormous impacts on the life chances of millions of people, and it’s why the pushback against bad policy is essential—and why depressed complacency about the currently dystopian state of the world, while understandable, is self-defeating and counterproductive.

There are solutions—and the ripple effects of our actions taken now can get us closer to implementing them, even (or especially) when it seems most hopeless.

IV: The Unlikely Frozen Blade and Experimental Archaeology

In 1998, in his book Shadows in the Sun, the anthropologist Wade Davis told a peculiar story about an Inuit man who refused to leave his natural lifestyle on the ice and join his family in a settlement. The family, it was said, eventually tried to force him into civilization by snatching away all his tools, making it impossible to hunt and survive without joining them in their village. Or so they thought.

But the man, according to the story, was undeterred. Without any tools, he would have to make new ones. So, the man “stepped out of the igloo, defecated, and honed the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva.” With his makeshift (s)tool, the Inuit man successfully fended for himself, killing animals for food before disappearing, as a defiantly self-sufficient man, into the icy darkness.

This story, as Jennifer Ouellette chronicles, spread like wildfire in the world of anthropology, becoming well-known in the field.

But was it true?

Because there was no way to track down the Inuit man in question, who is now long dead, the second best way to examine whether the story could be true is to test whether or not it’s actually possible. This is the task of the field of experimental archaeology, in which researchers try to accurately replicate technologies of the past and put them into use to see how they perform. Often, it involves forging stone tools, recreating buildings, or throwing spears to get a sense of their killing power.

Yet, for Metin Eren and Michelle Bebber, those approaches weren’t quite exciting enough. So, they decided to experimentally test whether one could, indeed, kill an animal with frozen feces, as the Inuit man was said to have done.

To most accurately carry out the experiment, however, they needed to first follow a strictly Inuit diet, which they did for eight days before the fateful test. And then, the moment arrived. Decades of rigorous training had made this possible. It was time to do science.

“It's funny, because we've got this amazing lab,” said Eren, but for that week, "I'm not in the lab—I'm in my house pooping in a bag, making knives out of my own feces. It was sort of depressing.”

They crafted the fecal knives using ceramic molds or simply using their hands to mold the feces into a rudimentary blade before sharpening them with a metal file after they were frozen solid. Then it was time to test them.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. The tale of the Inuit man is, more likely than not, apocryphal.

But these amusing peculiarities aside, experimental archaeology is an exciting and promising branch of scientific research in which the past is resurrected, then subjected to testing, all to see how ancient technologies actually work when put to use.

Several times, for example, I’ve had the privilege to visit Butser Ancient Farm. It’s a unique site in southern England, where experimental archaeologists have created neolithic dwellings, an Iron Age roundhouse, and a series of Roman and Anglo-Saxon buildings, all brought back to life from excavated ruins that give researchers a clear sense of what the buildings would have originally been like.

A replica of a stone age house at Butser Ancient Farm

By building these structures, they can experimentally test how well they weather various conditions, how they might have been repaired, as well as exploring agricultural techniques for fresh insights about how our distant ancestors actually lived. And, as Ouellette highlights, there’s tremendous promise in these techniques to yield fresh insights into a seemingly static, dead past.

“In my opinion, experimental archaeology is the future of the field,” said Eren. “The archaeological record itself is a finite resource. We already have 200 years of excavated data in museums. So what do we do when all the sites are gone? It’s this: experimental archaeology. We’ve been digging stuff up for 200 years, and we barely have an understanding of how any of it works.”

V: Mary and Max

A few weeks ago, I watched one of the more memorable films of recent memory, a black and white stop motion dark comedy that’s as strange as it is emotionally moving.

The film, Mary and Max, which features the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a charming but bizarre tale of a lonely Australian girl (Mary) who accidentally develops a pen pal relationship with an equally lonely American man with Aspergers (Max). Both are misunderstood and isolated from the people around them, but they find an unexpected connection through the letters they send to one another over the course of two decades.

In addition to being emotionally resonant, jarringly profound, and tremendously artistically creative, Mary and Max is also, at times, laugh out loud funny. And the film also happens to have an incredible soundtrack, mostly riffing on the catchy song Perpetuum Mobile by Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

If you’re open to unusual films and want an escape from the surefire mediocre sludge of Hollywood blockbusters, you could do far worse than spending part of your next movie night hanging out, for a time, with Mary and Max.

—Brian

Thanks for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition was for everyone, but I rely exclusively on reader support, so if you enjoyed this, or learned something new, and you want me to keep writing for you, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for just $4/month. Enjoy your weekend! I’ll be back in your inbox soon.

1. No, dear reader, you do not.