As one of the seemingly few non-driving Americans out there, and as someone who finds robotics in general pretty fascinating, I'm tremendously interested in the promises, prospects, and particulars of robotic vehicles. Though perhaps not as high on the list of "things I'd like to see in my lifetime" as, say, drastic improvements in social justice, effective longevity medicine, and widespread scientific literacy, robotic cars are definitely somewhere on said list. Not only could they benefit the environment (by automating certain common driving tasks and making them more efficient, thereby saving fuel), they could potentially provide new options for those today who cannot drive regular automobiles, as well as drastically reduce traffic injuries and fatalities across the population.
Anyway, Templeton's essay is definitely worth a read. He points out, quite rightly, that it was only a few years ago when the very idea of self-driving cars was considered pure science fiction. Now, given the impressive (and improving) performance of the autonomous vehicles in the DARPA Grand Challenge (a military-sponsored contest in which teams competed to create cars that could navigate a track without a human driver), more and more people are beginning to seriously consider robot cars as a potential reality for civilian applications.
Templeton also emphasizes what I often see as a much-neglected truth about automobile safety these days: that is, driving isn't particularly safe for anyone, not just those of us whose perceptual systems are optimized for activities other than driving:
Car accidents kill about 45,000 people every year in the USA, and a million around the world. They injure and maim millions more, and tear apart many more lives with grief, for these are all premature deaths, often among the young.
Consider that number in context. That's just a bit fewer than the numbers who die of Alzheimer's and Influenza, and more than the death toll of kidney disease, infections and suicide. It's double the death toll of liver disease and hypertension and nearly triple that of homicide. It's more than most individual diseases and cancers.
For young adults 15-34, of course, who do not fall nearly so often to heart disease or Alzheimer's, it the leading cause of death among the established categories.
Cars make life a lot more convenient for a lot of people, though -- to the point where I think many lose sight of the risks involved, or consider that they have to accept these risks because they don't have any other viable transportation options. Now, of course there's no guarantee that robot cars would be safer for the mere fact of being robotic, but it is definitely true that a well-designed robotic vehicle might very well be able to avoid some common areas of egregious human error. Templeton notes:
[The fact that the cost of accidents is arguably the single largest component of the per-mile cost of driving a vehicle] is important because to be accepted, robocars must have a dramatically lower rate of accidents -- as close to zero as possible. While no software system can every be truly free of bugs, because a "crash" here has a literal as well as metaphorical meaning, teams must work particularly hard. In addition, these technologies will arrive incrementally, in the form of "crash-resistant" cars which are still mostly driven by people.
The essay goes on to discuss the potential cost savings of robot cars, the areas where such cars might first be deployed, the attributes of today's vehicles that might suggest we're moving in the direction of "smarter" vehicles, etc. Check it out if you're curious about such things -- regardless of whether you agree with all the premises and conclusions, it's a good, comprehensive collection of thoughts on the subject of robotic vehicles.
Personally, when I think about what it might take to get robot cars deployed and put to use, I think not only in terms of the cars themselves but of the infrastructure they'd inhabit. A while back, I commented on a really neat article from a 1968 Mechanix Illustrated piece that attempted to describe the world of 2008 (which we now inhabit). I've long loved reading retro-futurist stuff (ever since I found a pile of ancient Science Digests in my great-grandmother's basement as a youngster), not only because it can be highly amusing, but because it can provide interesting insights into what the priorities and biases were in the past.
Anyway, the Mechanix Illustrated piece was particularly fascinating in that it ended up juxtaposing several eerily accurate predictions with several that just sound silly, to an even greater degree than I normally see in articles along similar lines. After reading it, I got to thinking about what characterized the accurate predictions vs. the inaccurate ones, and the main thing that came to mind was that it seems to be a lot easier to predict advances in communication and commerce than in large-scale infrastructure.
In other words, the article's description of television-telephone systems that allow families to shop for products from their own homes sounds a heck of a lot like Amazon.com and their ilk, but its description of gigantic super-domes over cities and special roads populated entirely by fast-moving autonomous vehicles sounds frankly kitschy given how 2008 actually ended up looking.
Much of 2008's urban/suburban landscape looks very similar to 1968's these days (at least based on pictures I've seen; I wasn't born until 1978) -- we've still got asphalt-paved roads, internal combustion vehicles everywhere, houses with peaked, shingled roofs and brown carpeting, etc. Sure, people are dressing differently these days, cars have different contours, and shopping malls are looking shinier, but most of that is essentially "window dressing" and fashion as opposed to unheard-of developments hastening a move toward crystal spires and togas.
Most of the things that might actually count as "revolutionary" developments (as usual, keeping in mind that over half the world still lacks flush toilets) remain subtle, even furtive: cellular towers blending inconspicuously along stretches of freeway alongside silos and power poles, blue CAT-5 cable stuffed and strung like bundles of blue spaghetti behind pithy office ceilings outfitted with flickery fluorescents, tiny computers nestled in purses and pockets. Certainly at least some lives, and much of the communication and commerce infrastructure have changed very much since 1968 -- but the physical landscape, and the ways in which we get around from place to place, really haven't.
Nevertheless, I definitely don't think we're going to need "domed, evenly climatized cities" (which don't sound like much fun anyway) in order to have robot cars, but things are definitely going to need to change rather a lot in urban and suburban areas before robot cars can really make the splash they ought to in order to enter common use.
Initially, this might mean something like "automated valet" services (which Templeton mentions) that will park your "smart" car in a garage when you arrive at your destination, and I can see something like this happening with something resembling existing infrastructure (in some parts of the world/country). Later on, though, we're going to run up against the matter of where people will want to live vs. where they want to shop, eat, go to school, work, etc. -- and that might entail larger re-builds of roadways and other current routes to support greater automation.
I definitely look forward to following further developments in this area!
22 comments:
As one of your tags was "robot overlords," I hope you will not be offended if I say that I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
I came here via Maizie's blog. *waves*
AnneC wrote:
> As one of the seemingly few non-driving
> Americans out there, and as someone who
> finds robotics in general pretty fascinating,
> I'm tremendously interested in the
> promises, prospects, and particulars of
> robotic vehicles.
I'm not especially sanguine about the prospects of an artificial superintelligence during my lifetime, but I've always rather hoped to live long enough to see the self-driving car.
Professor Mark Humphrys, of Dublin City University, also looks forward to this technology ( http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~humphrys/newsci.html )
"[I]f some of the intelligence of the horse can be put back into the automobile, thousands of lives could be saved, as cars become nervous of their drunk owners, and refuse to get into positions where they would crash at high speed. We may look back in amazement at the carnage tolerated in this age, when every western country had road deaths equivalent to a long, slow-burning war. In the future, drunks will be able to use cars, which will take them home like loyal horses. And not just drunks, but children, the old and infirm, the blind, all will be empowered.
Eventually, if cars were all (wireless) networked, and humans stopped driving altogether, we might scrap the vast amount of clutter all over our road system - signposts, markings, traffic lights, roundabouts, central reservations - and return our roads to a soft, sparse, eighteenth-century look. All the information - negotiation with other cars, traffic and route updates - would come over the network invisibly. And our towns and countryside would look so much sparser and more peaceful."
This is part of an essay in which Humphrys discusses his skepticism about the prospects for AI. He observes "Think where we came from. We had a whole planet to play with. We had a million years of time to develop our tools and our culture. There were many thousands to millions of us. How can we expect to build single isolated AI's, alone in laboratories, and get anywhere? They can't join in our culture because they are not like us (they don't understand our sensory world or our life experiences). They can't develop their own culture because they are not like each other. Even if we made them all identical, so they could talk to each other, they would need a lot of time and a lot of space to develop any rudimentary culture at all, and they would probably fail. The whole concept should make you despair. The planet is full. There's no space for another species and culture to develop.
There's more. Even if you somehow could give them the numbers and space they need to grow and develop, the process would not be fun, for us or them. The futurists, like so many people, fail to grasp the basic Darwinian world view that you can't get from here to there without passing through the mess in between. You can't get from simple robotic animals to the enlightened high intelligence of Hans Moravec's Mind Children without first passing through absurd superstitious savagery. Long before our AI's discovered science they would discover superstition. They would have their own religions, their own tribal hatreds, their own holocausts. They wouldn't listen to us telling them we'd been there, done that, any more than the Islamists currently reliving the Middle Ages are listening to the west today."
Sobering observations. On the other hand, think of all the robotic cars on the roads of the world, sharing a common (if largely one-dimensional) environment and a common cognitive architecture. Maybe they'd develop a sort of culture all their own. Not clear if they'd be able to talk to us about it, though, any more than we've been able to talk to the animals, even those with complex brains, and with whom we share our living spaces.
Jimf wrote: [AIs] can't join in our culture because they are not like us (they don't understand our sensory world or our life experiences). They can't develop their own culture because they are not like each other. Even if we made them all identical, so they could talk to each other, they would need a lot of time and a lot of space to develop any rudimentary culture at all, and they would probably fail. The whole concept should make you despair. The planet is full. There's no space for another species and culture to develop.
This is interesting because I was wondering recently about how humans with our existing diversity already have so much trouble communicating with each other. AI notwithstanding, sometimes it seems to me that humans (or at least enough humans for it to be significant) have an unfortunate tendency to want to eliminate differences, figuring perhaps that this will help "simplify" reality. When I've watched Star Trek and other shows involving human contact with sentient alien species, I've tended to think as of late that if humans actually encountered another sentient species and were able to establish even rudimentary communication with them, the immediate impulse would be to attempt to describe the aliens in terms of being "defective" humans, rather than taken on their own terms.
AnneC wrote:
> I was wondering recently about how
> humans with our existing diversity
> already have so much trouble
> communicating with each other.
> AI notwithstanding, sometimes it
> seems to me that humans (or at
> least enough humans for it to
> be significant) have an unfortunate
> tendency to want to eliminate differences,
> figuring perhaps that this will help
> "simplify" reality.
On the other hand:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/beware-the-psychopath-my-son/
"The following is largely extracted from two articles: Twilight of the Psychopaths, by Dr. Kevin Barrett and The Trick of the Psychopath’s Trade by Silvia Cattori. Both articles are recommended. Both articles reference the book Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes, by Andrzej Lobaczewski. Cattori’s article is longer and includes an interview with the book’s editors, Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Henry See."
Oh, God. If only I **didn't** know who Laura Knight-Jadczyk is.
Your remarks also remind me of an article in the latest (9 Aug) issue of _Newsweek_, that I picked up to read on the bus home a couple of nights ago. It's called "But I Did Everything Right!" by Sharon Begley.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/151758
The gist of the article is that child development experts contradict each other, and their advice sometimes contradicts the experience of parents, because of genetic variations in the nervous systems of kids, affecting basic temperament, susceptibility to reward and punishment, and so on.
The most interesting passage in this article for me was this:
"One of the strongest and most counterintuitive findings in this nascent field is that children with a sweet temperament, which is under strong genetic control, are the least likely to emulate their parents and absorb the lessons they teach, while fussy kids are the most likely to do so. Fussy children have a hypersensitive nervous system that is keenly attuned to its surroundings -— including what Mom and Dad do and say. In studies that are shaking up textbook dogmas, Jay Belsky of Birkbeck University of London has shown that fussy babies are therefore wired to be more strongly shaped by their parents than mellower children are. . . The mellow baby, immune to your charms, is more likely to show signs of road rage from the day she first takes her tricycle out for a spin, even though she grew up watching your saintly temper control. Children who go with the flow of new people and new situations are like Teflon: good parenting doesn't stick to them—but neither, necessarily, does bad parenting. They're the young adults who can't form close, meaningful relationships despite the unconditional love you showed them. 'Kids with difficult temperaments are more sensitive to the effects of parenting,' says Belsky. 'You can get by with sloppier parenting if you have a "good temperament" kid.' Even children who fall between the extremes are generally closer to one than the other."
An unpleasant feature of our modern, industrialized, bureaucratic civilization, with its one-size-fits-all education factories and one-size-fits-all job expectations, is that the "mellow" types -- the ones who can take it or leave it, the ones with built-in low-arousal nervous systems (who often need a great deal of excitement in their lives just in order to have "fun") are relatively undamaged by their passage through school (although extreme cases may end up in jail!), whereas the high-arousal types (like me and, I suspect, you) who are easily hurt, intimidated, and daunted, get a pretty rough ride. Some of the latter may be so damaged as never to reach their full potential, despite their gifts, while luckier ones, who have been more skillfully nurtured by sympathetic and aware parents, or who have been lucky enough to find a social milieu that gave them adequate support, may become outstanding people despite the societal currents they're swimming against.
There's a psychologist named Elaine Aron who has also published books about this "arousability"-based temperamental divide (she calls a person whose
nervous system has a high built-in baseline of arousal a "Highly Sensitive Person" [HSP]).
http://www.hsperson.com/
That article that I linked to above ("Beware the Psychopath, My Son" by Clinton Callahan, May 12th, 2008)
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/beware-the-psychopath-my-son/
contains the remark:
"[C]ivilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been built on slavery and mass murder. Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination. The inventor of civilization — the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers — was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies — especially military hierarchies."
A few weeks ago I visited Rhode Island as part of Motss Con XXI, the latest in a series of more-or-less yearly get togethers organized by volunteers from the Usenet group soc.motss, a discussion group for GLBT folks -- see http://www.clock.org/~jss/motss/con21.html for a description of this latest one (this was the first one I'd ever been to).
Anyway, one of the scheduled events was a visit to a late-18th-century textile mill, Slater's Mill
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Slater's-mill
http://www.slatermill.org/
Hearing about the working conditions of those Industrial Revolution era plants (little kids being expected, with their nimble hands, to repair machines while they were still running, people routinely going deaf as a result of the noise), and some of the sheer nastiness that went on (the mill owner deliberately mis-setting the clock in order to get a few extra minutes out of the workers, in retaliation against which the townspeople constructed their own church clocktower, which was in turn burned down, etc., etc.), and contrasting that with the amazing cleverness of the technology exhibited by those early plants, caused me to remark to a friend "We owe our modern technological civilization to those greedy entrepreneurs, but they were still sons-o'-bitches."
Rhode Island was also a vertex of the "triangle trade" -- rum was manufactured there, shipped to West Africa and exchanged for slaves, the slaves were then shipped to the West Indies where some of them were sold for sugar, and the remaining slaves and sugar completed the triangle by ending up back in New England as raw material for more rum. Most everybody of importance had a slice of the slave trade. We also visited the John Brown House, near the campus of Brown University, mansion of another historic SOB (needless to say, the tour guides do not refer to him as such).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(Rhode_Island)
http://www.rihs.org/Museums.html
I gazed at display cases there containing sobering artifacts of those days -- leg irons, and slave ships' bills of lading (containing much "boilerplate" religious language -- everything is "by the grace of God".
On the final day of the con, we took the New England High-Speed Ferry to Newport, where we visited "The Elms", a Great Gatsby-era Newport mansion
http://www.newportmansions.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elms_(mansion)
home of the Berwind family, whose patriarch made his fortune selling coal to the nascent railroad industry. Ah, the days before income tax, when you could live in a place requiring a staff of 85 servants just to run it. So many of our friendly libertarians and Ayn Randites long for a return of those good old days. :-/
> Your remarks also remind me of an article
> in the latest (9 Aug) issue of _Newsweek_,
> that I picked up to read on the bus home a
> couple of nights ago. It's called
> "But I Did Everything Right!"
> by Sharon Begley.
> http://www.newsweek.com/id/151758
And apropos the effects of temperament on child development (particularly in males), there's a book I just discovered, long out-of-print but apparently scanned and OCRed (or transcribed) and put on the Web as a PDF file:
_Love-Shyness: Shyness & Love: Causes,
Consequences, and Treatment_
by Dr. Brian G. Gilmartin (1985)
downloadable from
http://www.love-shy.com/
Interesting stuff.
JimF: Interesting stuff indeed. Though the "love-shy" site gives off an immediate "pickup artist" vibe to me, which in turn makes me think of Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia.
And on that note, if you (Jim) haven't seen Magnolia, I would definitely recommend it. It's close to 3 hours long, but well worth it. You in particular would have a field day analyzing all the characters. :P
AnneC wrote:
> [T]he "love-shy" site gives off an
> immediate "pickup artist" vibe to me,
> which in turn makes me think of
> Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia.
>
> And on that note, if you (Jim) haven't
> seen Magnolia, I would definitely
> recommend it.
Thanks for the movie recommendation -- I'll keep it in mind. (Tom Cruise the person gives me the creeps these days, but I'll try not to hold that against the film. ;-> )
The Gilmartin book on that site (_Love-Shyness: Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment_ by Dr. Brian G. Gilmartin) is really an eye-opener. Here's an astonishing passage ("Some Final Thoughts", p. 662 of the PDF, p. 631 of the book):
----------------------------
Elementary School Children
For the present moment, I strongly recommend that all conspicuously shy, timid, socially inhibited elementary school boys be singled out for experimentation with the monoamine oxidase inhibitors and/or the tricyclic antidepressant drugs. At the very least, these drugs will operate (most probably in 75 to 85 percent of all cases) to take away the anxiety and fears. Once the social anxieties and "rough and tumble" fears are removed, the child is free to learn interpersonal skills and at least normal levels of social self-confidence. It should always be remembered that the peer group is one of the two most powerfully important socializing agents. With a mind-state that is free from social fears and timidity, interpersonal interaction in the full-range of
children's activities becomes permitted. Once a child is accorded full participation in the mainstream of childish play, he can be assured (as this book has demonstrated) full access to the pleasures of dating, courtship and heterosexual interaction—once his fellow same-sexed buddies become involved in such activities.
Among high school and university students the MAO Inhibitors and tricyclics may also prove helpful as an accompanyment to practice-dating therapy. But for a smooth sail, high school (and especially college) age is far too late for such psychopharmacological medication. At such advanced ages the young person (1) must be helped to overcome long established habits of social inertia, and (2) must be put through often very difficult interpersonal skills/social self-confidence training—training to arrive at a level of performance and affect that his age-mates (competitors) had arrived at years before. I think that drug treatment should be used as an accompanyment to therapy for high school and college males; but such treatment may now represent a real boon to boys in the age 3 through 12 age bracket.
----------------------------
Wow, this guy was ahead of his time, in 1985. Can you imagine? Antidepressants for 3-year-olds! (And to think -- Iproniazid, the first MAO inhibitor, went on the market as an antidepressant in 1958. I started first grade that September. I wonder if **any** 5-year-old, anywhere in the world, got that stuff. Hm. Maybe if the 5-year-old had tuberculosis.)
Dr. Brian G. Gilmartin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_G._Gilmartin ) on YouTube:
(Part 1)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8774746636977700419
(Part 2)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8774746636977700419
These are segments from a documentary in progress (described at http://www.involuntarycelibacy.com ), several more of which are also available on YouTube (they'll be displayed in the "Related Videos" panel when you access the Gilmartin video).
"Dr. Gilmartin estimates that 40% of male love-shys have Asperger's Syndrome." according to
http://loveshyproject.com/ASD.html
JimF:
You said: (Tom Cruise the person gives me the creeps these days, but I'll try not to hold that against the film. ;-> )
Well, the character he plays in Magnolia is pretty creepy himself, so in that sense it sort of "works". :P
And regarding all the "love-shy" stuff: err, to me it gives off a very strong "pop psychology" odor, in the form of trying to establish a pseudo-clinical framework by which men who don't think they're getting enough intimate attention can work to remedy the situation. And the stuff about giving antidepressants to male preschoolers who might be "shy"...yeesh.
I'm almost certain if you follow that particular rabbit hole deep enough you will find a guy at the end trying to sell books and hold seminars on "taming women" using NLP or something similar. Rather like...Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia.
Also, back on topic to the original post: I really like that Humphrys quote (especially this part):
"[I]f some of the intelligence of the horse can be put back into the automobile, thousands of lives could be saved, as cars become nervous of their drunk owners, and refuse to get into positions where they would crash at high speed. We may look back in amazement at the carnage tolerated in this age, when every western country had road deaths equivalent to a long, slow-burning war. In the future, drunks will be able to use cars, which will take them home like loyal horses. And not just drunks, but children, the old and infirm, the blind, all will be empowered.
That's a lot along my own lines of thinking -- people nowadays are so cavalier about traffic hazards even though the carnage is utterly astronomical. It's a very interesting bit of social psychology there, actually -- if something is seen as being "convenient" (or socially acceptable) enough, people tend to have an amazing ability to ignore danger and cost. I'm not saying cars as they stand now should be banned or anything (that would be ridiculous and infeasible), but I do think people are still way too complacent about the way things are now on the US roads. And I do think that pushing toward greater automation, at least for freeway-type systems at first (and parking garages) would be a very good thing.
> [R]egarding all the "love-shy"
> stuff. . . I'm almost certain
> if you follow that particular
> rabbit hole deep enough you will
> find a guy at the end trying to
> sell books and hold seminars on
> "taming women" using NLP or
> something similar.
I think you've radically misinterpreted the import of this stuff. A great deal of, for example, the Gilmartin book (which is almost a quarter-century old) is about the evils of forcing certain kids -- well, I won't say "non-neurotypicals", but kids with minority temperaments (particularly males, because **females** with these minority temperaments are not stigmatized) -- into activities and social milieux, particularly in grade school, which **guarantee** that they are going to emerge emotionally damaged, probably for life.
I know that bullying of kids is one of your concerns. Gilmartin describes institutions, such as the typical American grade school, which **foster** the bullying of a predictably-identifiable minority of kids.
I guess the topicality of this is questionable, but it sort of grew out of your comment (in response to Humphrys' remarks about AI) about how human diversity is so often treated as a "disease" to be "cured". Even worse is the case when certain (potentially valuable) human variants are simply treated as "losers" to be chewed up and discarded. At the same time, folks with psychopathic tendencies often rise to the top here in God Bless America.
JimF said:
I think you've radically misinterpreted the import of this stuff.
It's quite possible -- I've been wrong in my impressions before. Perhaps I should have reviewed the material more carefully before judging it so harshly. However, the quotes you've provided from the Gilmartin book make it sound like they're pathologizing these "minority temperaments" and hence suggesting that boys exhibiting them be drugged early in life so they can grow up into their "birthright" of getting properly laid someday via typical participation in various social rituals.
Maybe if I read the rest of the book I'd get a different impression, and you are totally correct that I'm very concerned about bullying and general emotional/physical damage to young kids caused by improper treatment and environment. But I am not going to lie -- the bit you quoted from Gilmartin (along with the "involuntary celibacy" URL) set off some alarms somewhere in my brain.
Like most things there could be some decent stuff mixed in (and certainly when looking at older writings, it is often necessary to consider the context in which they were written). I realize that, I was just stating my initial impressions.
JimF said:
I guess the topicality of this is questionable, but it sort of grew out of your comment (in response to Humphrys' remarks about AI) about how human diversity is so often treated as a "disease" to be "cured".
Oh I am definitely not a strict topicality enforcer -- I think the associational stuff that some discussions end up producing is fascinating and well worth examining. I was just personally beginning to lose track of the chain of associations and wanted to bring things back around so I could get my bearings, if that makes any sense.
Even worse is the case when certain (potentially valuable) human variants are simply treated as "losers" to be chewed up and discarded. At the same time, folks with psychopathic tendencies often rise to the top here in God Bless America.
This I agree with completely -- and I do think it is quite topical, especially per one of my initial comments.
My only point of confusion is that you seem to be consistently expressing things that make sense to me, but then quoting from sources that I am having trouble seeing as supporting what you are expressing elsewhere. E.g., when I read a paragraph containing the following:
Once a child is accorded full participation in the mainstream of childish play, he can be assured (as this book has demonstrated) full access to the pleasures of dating, courtship and heterosexual interaction—once his fellow same-sexed buddies become involved in such activities.
...it sounds to me like it's saying, "Make these boys normal! The only way they can be happy and successful in life is for them to be normal! And, of course, heterosexual! And they must do certain things at the same time as everyone else!"
Again, not having read the book perhaps I'm being too harsh...but I am having trouble seeing how someone can write a paragraph like this and then go on to decry bullying and the pervasive problems of the public school peer hierarchy.
Unless maybe you were being sarcastic/ironic somewhere, and I didn't catch it...I can be dense like that sometimes. :P
Oh, and one more clarification (JimF):
I certainly do not mean to imply that I think you agree with the drugging of shy young boys and with assertions that they need to be helped toward the joyous fortress of hetero-normativity.
I would have to be a ridiculously inattentive reader of your comments to think anything like that, so be assured I don't! :)
It is slowly dawning on me that maybe what is going on here is that you are quoting something which has some decent information in the source material, but which is also "dated" in various ways (while at the same time being eerily predictive of certain attitudes that are making the rounds today). Is that about right?
AnnC wrote (apropos the Brian G. Gilmartin book):
> [I]t sounds to me like it's saying,
> "Make these boys normal! The only way
> they can be happy and successful in
> life is for them to be normal! And, of
> course, heterosexual! And they must do
> certain things at the same time as
> everyone else!"
> . . .
>
> Again, not having read the book
> perhaps I'm being too harsh...but I
> am having trouble seeing how someone
> can write a paragraph like this
> and then go on to decry bullying
> and the pervasive problems of
> the public school peer hierarchy.
>
> Unless maybe you were being
> sarcastic/ironic somewhere, and I
> didn't catch it. . .
No, no! On the contrary, Gilmartin is saying that certain temperamental variants, while in the minority, should **not** be penalized by forcing everybody to "do certain things at the same time as everyone else". Maybe some additional quotes will clarify things:
book p. 40 PDF p. 71
Chapter 2, "Love-Shyness and the Nature Versus Nurture Debate"
[I]t is no accident that people who suffer from chronic, intractable cases of love-shyness ALL (with no exceptions) possess native temperaments which place them high up in the. . . (melancholic quadrant) of the [Eysenck cross of inborn temperament].
[Hans J.] Eysenck has concluded that inborn introversion is a natural byproduct of high native arousal levels in the cerebral cortex, and that these high arousal levels are caused by an overactive ascending reticular formation (lower brain) which bombards the higher brain and central nervous system when social or other stimuli (perceived as threatening) are presented. This inborn hyperarousability of introverts accounts (1) for their forming conditioned patterns of anxiety and other inappropriate emotional responses all too easily; and (2) for the much greater difficulty in extinguishing maladaptive conditioned responses in introverts as compared to extroverts and ambiverts. (Ambiverts include the large majority of the population who are "in between" the extrovert and introvert extremes.) These facts partially account for the high prevalence of introverts among the ranks of neurotics and the love-shy. However, as I shall attempt to demonstrate shortly, even an extreme introvert need not develop chronic, intractable love-shyness or any other form of neurosis.
In stark contrast to the foregoing, Eysenck found that highly extroverted people tend to have underaroused brains and nervous systems. Simply put, they are stimulus hungry. This is why they are always craving and seeking excitement of one kind or another, and why they must constantly have people around them.
Emotionality (high versus low anxiety threshold) is also a byproduct of inborn differences in human physiology, and particularly in the autonomic nervous system and lymbic system. Simply put, various reactions of the body such as heartbeat, rapid breathing, the cessation of digestion to make blood flow away from the stomach and to prepare the organism for flight or fight, tend to be significantly more labile and easily aroused (and less easily stopped) in highly emotional (low anxiety threshold) people. Emotional reactions are regulated by the visceral brain, and herein lies the locus of the inborn personality dimension of emotionality.
book p. 48 PDF p. 79
Chapter 2, "Love-Shyness and the Nature Versus Nurture Debate"
In his book entitled TEMPERAMENT AND BEHAVIOR DISORDERS IN CHILDREN, Dr. [Alexander] Thomas talks at considerable length about what he calls the "slow-to-warm-up child". And he presents an impressive amount of research evidence showing how this type of seemingly "difficult" child can eventually become indistinguishable in adjustment from the other seemingly "easy", naturally sociable children when (1) copious opportunity is accorded for informal play amidst an accepting peer group that is engaged in enjoyable, non-anxiety-provoking activities, and (2) when patient, kindly and accepting attitudes are held by parents and teachers.
Simply put, when a child is accepted as he is he becomes free to grow, to mature, to change in a positive direction, and to become his true self. When a child is accorded caring and respect for his feelings and emotional needs, he inevitably becomes a caring and respecting person who gradually comes to "fit in" remarkably well. But when that same "slow-to-warm-up" child is forced to conform to parental or teacher expectations and to play amidst a physically aggressive, highly competitive peer group which he finds frightening and anxiety-provoking, he tends to withdraw. Indeed, he tends to regress and to become progressively less mature by comparison with the other children in his age cohort.
In essence, the more rigid and uncompromising the parental expectations are, the more time the "slow-to-warm-up" child will take to adjust, to mature, and to "fit in". Simply put, it is counterproductive to try to standardize human personality because the raw materials (including native temperament) differ for each child within each of the two sexes.
As Thomas has argued, there is a long-standing tradition in American society of trying to force square pegs into round holes—of endeavoring to do whatever seems feasible to make the behavior, feelings and interests of a child fit prevailing norms and expectations. Thomas' findings show that there is a costly price to be paid for our callous insistence upon trying to standardize human personalities. A far more socially beneficial approach, as Thomas' research data have shown, is to modify the expectations of parents, peers and teachers to fit the native temperament of the child. When this tack is followed, the child flourishes, grows, matures, and is ultimately as normal in his behavior patterns as the bulk of his peers.
Modifying parental and peer expectations can be effectively accomplished through (1) education of the parents and teachers as to the nature and limits posed by native temperament; (2) the creation of support groups for parents of shy, inhibited, "slow-to-warm-up" children; and (3) providing the seemingly "difficult" child with a choice of peer groups and of peer group activities. In regard to this last point, one child's medicine is another child's poison. The typical male child flourishes in the all-boy peer group that is engaged in "rough and tumble" play. In contrast, the introverted, inhibited, "slow-to-warm-up" child flourishes best in the small sized, coeducational peer group that engages in more gently competitive activities such as volleyball, bowling, hide and seek, miniature golf, swimming, shuffle board, horseshoes, croquet, ping pong, etc.
To be sure, militant physical education enthusiasts have quibbled that these more gentle sports and games do not provide the exercise that male children need. (This objection is ludicrous inasmuch as the "gentle" sport of swimming, for example, exercises more bodily muscles than does football, basketball and baseball. Moreover, all male children are not alike in their exercise needs!) As Thomas' research data have shown, the traditional tact of insisting that all male children take part in the same "rough and tumble" activity has eventuated in two consequences that are very deleterious from the standpoint of both the individual and the wider society: (1) The melancholic child. . . withdraws from play and consequently does not get any outdoor physical exercise at all. In short, very few melancholic male children subordinate themselves to the rigid requirement they they must play "rough and tumble" games. They simply withdraw; and as a result they get little or nothing of the physical exercise which the physical education enthusiasts deem so extremely important. The point here is that something is always better than nothing! (2) The melancholic child fails to develop the interpersonal skills and the social self-confidence that are so necessary for success, happiness and adjustment in this or in any other society. Since he is mistreated, bullied, abused, and/or ignored by the peers society tells him he must play with, he quickly develops a "people-phobia". In essence, he learns to associate being around age-mates with feelings of anxiety, pain, and strong displeasure. More succinctly, whereas most people learn to associate feelings of pleasure and happiness with the idea of "friends", the melancholic boy learns to associate feelings of pain and anxiety with the idea of "friends". For him peers cause pain, NOT pleasure!
This latter point is of enormous importance. Active involvement in enjoyable childhood play has long been known to be an indispensable Prerequisite (in both humans and monkeys) to competent, effective adulthood. Indeed, social and psychoemotional adjustment in adulthood absolutely requires and necessitates a long-term history of happy involvement in play throughout the years of childhood. Play is not the sort of frivolous activity some people think it is. Play represents an indispensable component of the classroom of life—much more indispensable, in fact, than the "3 Rs" that are learned in the indoor classroom. Research has shown that people can pick up the "3 Rs" and other intellectual/technical skills at any age. Unfortunately, socioemotional and interpersonal skills that are not picked up at the normal times during the course of childhood play cannot normally be picked up for the first time in later life. More succinctly, it is vastly more difficult for an adult to pick up interpersonal skills and social self-confidence for the first time, than it is for him to pick up intellectual/technical skills or knowledge for the first time.
People can cultivate and expand their intellects at any age. Unfortunately, the nature of man is such that deficits in the interpersonal/socioemotional areas cannot easily be rectified in adulthood or late adolescence. This is why education in these areas is so important throughout the years of early and middle childhood. And it is the peer group, NOT parents or teachers, who provide this indispensable education. And this is why we shall never successfully prevent chronic love-shyness in males unless and until we make sure that ALL little boys have ready access at all times throughout their formative years to a peer group and to play activities which they can truly enjoy and to which they can always look forward with positive emotional feelings of happiness and enthusiasm.
book p. 98 PDF p. 129
Chapter 3, "Societal Reactions and Elastic Limits"
Dark Crayons and Drab Drawings
Here is another example of the often very serious consequences that befall a child as a result of being enmeshed in a role from which he/she cannot extracate himself/herself. The story concerns a little boy in a fourth grade classroom comprised of about forty pupils. Several times each week all the children were encouraged to draw pictures with the crayons that the teacher provided. And after each picture-drawing session the boy would hand in a drawing that invariably was composed exclusively of dark, drab colors. All of this little boy's drawings were consistently limited to blacks, grays, dark greens, and other very drab shades. And after several months of such drawings the teacher began to become worried. She finally decided to take a large number of the boy's drawings to the school psychologist.
A few days later the psychologist called the child into his office and simply asked him why he drew all these dark, drab pictures. The child's response was that he really didn't have any choice in the matter. He didn't want to draw such dreary pictures. But the teacher always started the crayon box at the front of the room. And by the time the crayon box got back to him in the final seat of the rear row, the only crayons left were the blacks, the grays, the dark greens, the browns, and other less than "happy" colors.
The moral to this story is that society often creates pathology as a result of the situations in which it places people. Some situations are especially conducive to pathology whereas others are conducive to health, happiness and adjustment. In essence, boys with high inborn introversion and fearfulness are often required to adapt to situations which simply do not "fit" these native attributes. And because they are forced to remain in these situations they simply do not thrive; and indeed they regress as per the "wishbone effect" discussed earlier. Were society to place these boys in school situations that comfortably fit their native temperaments, they would no longer be bullied, hazed, harassed or belittled for inborn attributes over which they have no control or choice. And they would begin to thrive.
book p. 234 PDF p. 265
Chapter 10, "Love Shyness and the All-Male Peer Group"
[T]here is mounting evidence that society **creates** neurotics as a result of into a certain interest and activity mold. I believe that to the extent that we create options for children—to the extent that we afford them a choice of more than just one type of peer group, to that extent we are likely to begin observing a sharp dropping off in the incidence of incipient neuroticism. . .
book p. 244 PDF p. 275
Chapter 10, "Love Shyness and the All-Male Peer Group"
We must put a stop to the multitudinous shyness-generating situations to which our male children are exposed every day throughout the entirety of their formative years. I believe that this can be accomplished without imposing any strain upon cramped school budgets, and without inconveniencing boys who truly prefer to select "rough and tumble" forms of play. All children should be expected to take an active part in some sports activities. But all children must be accorded a choice as to which sports activities they wish to involve themselves in. The available choices for children of all age levels must be made sufficiently varied to accommodate people of inhibited and melancholic temperament. School districts are already required by law to accommodate the blind, the deaf, and children of all intelligence levels who are slow in learning how to read. Similar accommodations must also be made for children who are exceptional in the extremely important area of native temperament. American education quite fallaciously assumes that making friends "comes natural" to all children, and that relaxed, easy-going sociability is therefore something which need not be taught. For the naturally reserved, making friends and learning "small talk" does not "come natural". Just as slow readers are given a set of learning experiences that is different from that which is accorded the majority of children, a "different" set of classroom experiences must similarly be developed for shy and withdrawn, socially handicapped children.
Towards this end I believe that a recreation and physical education program that is in harmony with the psychoemotional needs of ALL children represents one of the most promising means for the prevention of chronic and intractable love-shyness. Such a program of recreation and physical education must incorporate three basic ingredients: (1) children must be permitted a choice of activities; options other than "rough and tumble" play must be readily available; (2) coeducational sports and games must always be available for those children who want it; and (3) inhibited, melancholic, low anxiety threshold boys must never be required to play among a group of children containing bullies or rugged, "rough and tumble" oriented individuals.
This third point is of especial importance. For even if the game were tiddleywinks, if an inhibited boy were assigned to play along side a "rough and tumble" oriented boy, you can rest assured that the inhibited boy would very soon be bullied, and would soon learn to withdraw from tiddleywinks! Boys of diametrically opposite native temperaments must never be made to play together. Lambs must never be made to play with lion cubs! Just as the mentally retarded are never educated in the same classroom as the intellectually gifted, the highly inhibited must never be thrown in with the highly exuberant, aggressive extrovert. This is true no matter what sport or game might be involved.
book p. 248 PDF p. 279
Some of my critics have charged that the above twenty-four activities do not provide the competition that boys allegedly need to a greater extent than girls. Critics have also insisted that with the exception of volleyball these are not team sports; and that team sports are somehow necessary for teaching boys how to cooperate. The usual contention is that a cooperative spirit is picked up from active participation in baseball, basketball, and football; and that this cooperative and competitive spirit somehow transfers to the business world and to life in general. I would suggest that competitive drive is essentially a function of native temperament. Boys with an aggressive temperament are highly likely to gravitate naturally towards baseball, basketball and football. And they are similarly quite likely to display this aggressive drive vis-a-vis the business world. Simply put, it is not competitive sports that causes competitive business drive. Every Sunday afternoon the bars are loaded with rather noncompetitive blue-collar men who have a great love of competitive sports. Instead, active participation in competitive sports AND active competition in the business world both reflect an inborn temperament that is fundamentally aggressive and characterized by a high anxiety threshold.
As for cooperation, girls have long grown up without being required to partake in "rough and tumble" athletics. Yet it seems to me that females display far more of a cooperative spirit vis-a-vis each other than males typically do. Quite clearly, women do not enter adulthood less capable than men of cooperating effectively with others. The notion that participation in "rough and tumble" sports is a necessary condition for inspiring a spirit of cooperation and of friendly competition appears nothing short of ludicrous.
Of course, the available research evidence has documented what is actually a far more important point. When shy and withdrawn boys are required to participate in "rough and tumble" activities they withdraw into their private shells all the more completely. By encouraging shy and withdrawn boys to participate, away from the company of bullies and other aggressive individuals, in the twenty-four activities I have suggested (in lieu of rugged calesthenics and contact sports), the shy will be accorded the opportunity to (1) make friends, and (2) to develop the interpersonal skills and social self-confidence that are crucial to success and happiness throughout life.
book p. 570 PDF p. 601
Chapter 24 "Some Recommendations Concerning Prevention"
In criminology today there is an increasing and much welcomed trend towards the assuring and protecting of the victim's rights. Bullies cause emotional scars and ruin lives by creating "people-phobes" and social isolates. Moreover, in not being swiftly, consistently, and severely punished for their mindless cruelty, bullies' tendencies to treat their fellow human beings as things (without feelings, or with feelings that do not count) rather than as people, are strongly reinforced and rewarded. . .
I strongly oppose all forms of racial and sexual segregation. But as an educator I very strongly support segregation of elementary school aged children on the basis of native temperament. Highly aggressive, bullying-prone male children must not take classes in the same classroom or play on the same playgrounds as naturally inhibited, low anxiety threshold male children. Wolves are not kept in the same pen as lambs, and Chihuahuas and Miniature Poodles are not housed with Dobermans. Most shy children do not need to be educated exclusively with other shy children. But they certainly must not be made to regularly interface with those whose native temperaments are poles apart from their own, and whose very presence represents noxious stimuli.
JimF: OK, thank you for the additional quotes -- things are quite a bit clearer now. I still don't agree with everything the author says (as I suspect is the case for you as well), but I can see why you quoted it in the first place at least.
AnneC wrote:
> I still don't agree with everything the
> author says (as I suspect is the case
> for you as well. . .
Indeed. Particularly as Chapter 4 is titled "Astrology and Reincarnation". ;-> (The author also talks about Kirlian photographs of the "auras" of the love-shy.)
I didn't know anything about this author until quite recently -- I heard about him on another internet forum. Reading this book, however, makes me both angry and sad, as I recognize so much of myself in his descriptions, and I feel as though things were **done** to me to make me as emotionally dysfunctional as I seem to be as an adult (both by my parents and by the school system).
> Reading this book. . . makes me both
> angry and sad. . .
It's funny. Twenty years ago, there was a woman at the place I was working at the time (the NYU Robotics Lab -- I suppose I can say that ;-> ) who befriended me, partly because she saw that I was what she called "wary" around people, and so she thought I might have "issues" in common with her own. She was working through a great deal of bitterness toward her parents, and she had found her own story in a book she strongly recommended to me: Alice Miller's _Prisoners of Childhood: the Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self_. It's all about "recognizing" the emotional abuse (being discounted, being expected to conform) that you suffered at the hands of your parents. I just could not relate to this particular formulation, much to this woman's frustration (she probably thought I needed to see a shrink who would encourage me to stop "covering up" for my own parents).
However, the Gilmartin book is definitely "my" story. Reading it, I can feel the anger my erstwhile friend must have tapped into as a result of reading Alice Miller's book(s).
> . . .they need to be helped toward
> the joyous fortress of hetero-normativity. . .
One of the interesting things that Gilmartin points out is that homosexual orientation is **orthogonal** to what he calls "love shyness" (social phobia -- which turns into a lifelong inability to form an emotionally-intimate [and sexually-intimate, of course, but Gilmartin calls sex merely "frosting on the cake"] relationship with a life partner -- stemming from a cruel mismatch between a boy's native temperament and contemporary child-rearing practices). This is particularly interesting in light of some "reparative therapists'" views on the etiology of male homosexuality (e.g., Joseph Nicolosi of NARTH) -- putting aside the reparative therapists' usual religious agenda. The NARTHians and other reparative "theoreticians" postulate that male homosexuality is caused when a boy with a "sensitive" temperament is **permitted** to "run away" from masculinizing activities (like sports) and who, as a result, doesn't get enough "male bonding" (with his father and with male peers) as a child, and so who goes looking for it as an adolescent and an adult (at which time it also becomes eroticized). But the embarrassing thing for the reparatives is that while this pattern may be true of **some** homosexuals (it's certainly true of me), it fails to account for them all (homosexual **athletes** are obvious exceptions -- how do you account for Billy Bean or Ed Gallagher?). And, of course, Gilmartin explicitly focuses on the other segment of men who don't fit the NARTHian model -- the men who experienced the etiological conditions they postulate as the "cause" of homosexuality, but who turned out **heterosexual** (at least in orientation). Gilmartin, though he took pains to **exclude** homosexuals from his own studies (just so he could control the variable) nevertheless acknowledges that there are gay men who are "love shy" (and who are therefore, at least in that way, about as far from the popular stereotype of gay men as you can get).
Just a final comment about the "love shy" business:
AnneC wrote:
> . . .a pseudo-clinical framework by
> which men who don't think they're
> getting enough intimate attention
> can work to remedy the situation. . .
>
> you will find a guy at the end
> trying to sell books and hold seminars
> on "taming women" using NLP or
> something similar. . .
I can, after all, see how you got this impression. Some of the Web sites do sort of shade into that kind of thing. As one poster on love-shy.com complained, "What I find funny is the appropriation of the term love-shy for all these athletic, extroverted, high-achieving, handsome, and popular college guys. I recognized myself in the descriptions of the typical love-shy males in Gilmartin's book, but more than half of the people posting here and in the Yahoo group seem to be normal males. . . The only thing I've learned about love-shyness in these forums is that all the success stories are posted by high-achieving twenty-something males who already have quite active social lives. Basically, this site is a place for slightly late-blooming men in their late teens and early twenties to exchange dating tips. The intractable freakshow thirty-something cases are tolerated here but I can tell that the college guys and young professionals would prefer it if losers like me would refrain from posting. . ."
And then of course there's "Doc Love" ( http://menstuff.org/columns/doclov/archive.html ); and Neil Strauss, author of _The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game:_Penetrating_the_Secret_Society_of_Pickup_Artists
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0omMTu9Ax8
No, at least Gilmartin **is** a real psychologist. ;->
> [T]he quotes you've provided from the
> Gilmartin book make it sound like they're
> pathologizing these "minority temperaments"
> and hence suggesting that boys exhibiting
> them be drugged early in life so they
> can grow up into their "birthright" of
> getting properly laid someday. . .
>
> My only point of confusion is that you
> seem to be consistently expressing things
> that make sense to me, but then quoting
> from sources that I am having trouble
> seeing as supporting what you are
> expressing elsewhere. . . Unless maybe
> you were being sarcastic/ironic
> somewhere, and I didn't catch it. . .
Ah yes, I guess I was, initially, sort of. The first quote I dragged out was the one from the end that sort of took my breath away when I first read it, about prescribing MAO inhibitors to 3-year-olds. I elided the fact that the **bulk** of the book (apart from the stuff about astrology, reincarnation, auras, and Kirlian photography) makes perfect sense to me.
Gilmartin spends most of the book recommending public policies (like segregating elementary-school students by temperament) that certainly haven't happened anywhere since the book was written and don't look like happening anytime soon, and **some** policies (like outlawing football) that will happen when hell freezes over. Then, at the end, he says "**For the present moment**, I strongly recommend. . . experimentation with. . . antidepressant drugs. . ." which does kind of reverse his whole program and put the onus back on the kid to take a pill to be "fixed". Apart from the fact that no one, then or now, would sanction giving an antidepressant to a 3-year-old, I can't help but fantasize about what I would do if given the choice to wave a magic wand and have the 5-year-old that I was in 1958 be put on an MAO inhibitor before being forced to attend public school for the first time. Would I do it, or not? I might be quite a different person now. Would I be better off? I find it a fascinating thing to daydream about.
From Neil Strauss on Jimmy Kimmel: "One of the guys in this book, this guy named Ross Jefferies who Tom Cruise's character is based on in _Magnolia_ says one of the rules is 'demonstrate authority over her world'. . ."
;-> ;-> (I'm just Googling, here.)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8922438252743243885
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