Science & Fun - Jonathan Graehl

Miles Davis (Playboy interview, 1962):

Then they claim I ignore the audience while I’m playing. Man, when I’m working, I know the people are out there. But when I’m playing, I’m worrying about making my horn sound right.

And they bitch that I won’t talk to people when we go off after a set. That’s a damn lie. I talk plenty of times if everything’s going like it ought to and I feel right. But if I got my mind on something about my band or something else, well, hell, no, I don’t want to talk. When I’m working I’m concentrating. I bet you if I was a doctor sewing on some son of a bitch’s heart, they wouldn’t want me to talk.

Anybody wants to believe all this crap they hear about me, it’s their problem, not mine. Because, look, man, I like people. I love people! I’m not going around telling everybody that. I try to say that my way – with my horn. Look, when I was a boy, ten years old, I got a paper route and it got bigger than I could handle because my customers liked me so much. I just delivered papers the best I could and minded my business, the same way I play my horn now. But a lot of the people I meet now make me sick.

In high school, I was the best in the music class on the trumpet. I knew it and all the rest knew it - but all the contest first prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. It made me so mad I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn. If I hadn’t met that prejudice, I probably wouldn’t have had as much drive in my work. I have thought about that a lot. I have thought that prejudice and curiosity have been responsible for what I have done in music.

 

I told them an artist’s first responsibility was to himself. I said if he kept getting upset with what other people think he ought to do, he never would get too far, or he sure wouldn’t last. I tried to make them see how I had worked all my life to play myself and then to get a band worth people paying to hear. I said that a lot of times when people in a club wanted to talk to me, I needed to be worrying about something about my band. They said they understood. I hope they did.

 

Crow Jim is what they call that. Yeah. It’s a lot of the Negro musicians mad because most of the best-paying jobs go to the white musicians playing what the Negroes created. But I don’t go for this, because I think prejudice one way is just as bad as the other way. I wouldn’t have no other arranger but Gil Evans – we couldn’t be much closer if he was my brother. And I remember one time when I hired Lee Konitz, some colored cats bitched a lot about me hiring an ofay in my band when Negroes didn’t have work. I said if a cat could play like Lee, I would hire him, I didn’t give a damn if he was green and had red breath.

 

I won’t play nowhere I know has the kind of audiences that you waste your breath to play for. I’m talking about them expense-account ofays that use music as a background for getting high and trying to show off to the women they brought. They ain’t come to hear good music. They don’t even know how to enjoy themselves. They drink too much, they get loud, they got to be seen and heard. They’ll jump up and dance jigs and sing. They ain’t got no manners - don’t pay their women no respect. What they really want is some Uncle Tom entertainment if it’s a Negro group on the stand. These are the kind will holler, “Hey, boy, play Sweet Georgia Brown!” You supposed to grin and play that. I hate to play in a place full of those kind of squares so bad that if there wasn’t nobody else to play to, I’d invest in some more property and just stay home and collect rents. I can’t stand dumb-ass people not respecting the other customers that have come to hear the music. Sometimes one table like that has bugged me so that when I get home or to my hotel, I walk the floor because I can’t sleep.

I told you I ain’t going to play nowhere in the South that Negroes can’t come. But I ain’t going to play nowhere in the North that Negroes don’t come. It’s one of two reasons they won’t, either because they know they ain’t wanted, or because they don’t like the joint’s regular run of music. Negroes ain’t got as much money to throw away in nightclubs as white people. So a club that Negroes patronize, you can figure that everybody that goes there comes expecting to hear good music.

 

 About the first thing I can remember as a little boy was a white man running me down a street hollering “Nigger! Nigger!” My father went hunting him with a shotgun. Being sensitive and having race pride has been in my family since slave days. The slave Davises played classical string music on the plantations.

 

 I grew up with an allowance, and I had a big newspaper route. I saved most of what I made except for buying records. But when I first left home as a musician, I used to spend all I made, and when I went on dope, I got in debt. But after I got enough sense to kick the habit, I started to make more than I needed to spend unless I was crazy or something.

Now I got a pretty good portfolio of stock investments, and I got this house - it’s worth into six figures, including everything in it. My four kids are coming up fine. When the boys get in from school, I want you to see them working out on the bags in our gym downstairs. I keep myself in shape and teach the kids how to box. They can handle themselves. Ain’t nothing better that a father can pass along. Then I got my music, I got Frances, and my Ferrari - and our friends. I got everything a man could want - if it just wasn’t for this prejudice crap. It ain’t that I’m mad at white people, I just see what I see and I know what’s happening. I am going to speak my mind about anything that drags me about this Jim Crow scene. This whole prejudice mess is something you would feel so good if it could just be got rid of, like a big sore eating inside of your belly.

 

@ 40 seconds

They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”

Based on the reporter’s description, I expected that the chocolate eaters merely tried harder because of the caffeine and sugar (both of which are known to help motivate or support mental labor).

 

But the actual  study was careful of this (see pg 1254, Method, and Table 1); a no-food no-temptation control group performed the same as the chocolate-indulging group. It was only the radish-eating chocolate-resisters (giving up 40% sooner due to the psychic pain of resisting a fresh-baked-chocolate-chip-cookie temptation).

Funny.

people there report no difference in insomnia between winter, when there are only 3 hours of daylight, or in summer, when there are 21 hours of daylight.

The researchers were surprised because earlier studies have indicated that darkness
during winter might accentuate depression and the sleeplessness that derives from it.

Seasonal Variations in Sleep Problems at Latitude 63°–65° in Norway The Nord-Trøndelag Health Study, 1995–1997 

Most studies on seasonal variability in sleep have asked participants if they think their sleep quality varies with the seasons, which reveals the research hypothesis to the participants. To date, the hypothesis of seasonal variation in sleep has not been tested in a large population-based fully blinded study. The aim of the current study was to investigate monthly variations in sleep problems in a geographic region of Norway with large seasonal differences in daytime light. Using data from a general health survey, the authors had access to information on sleep in the general population, collected across the seasons over 2 years without linking sleep to seasonal variation. In all, 43,045 participants (mean age, 44.6 years) of the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study, 1995–1997 (referred to as “HUNT-2”), provided reports of insomnia symptoms and time in bed in all months except July. The mean prevalence of insomnia symptoms was 12.4%. No evidence of a seasonal variation on reports of insomnia symptoms or time in bed was found. These null findings are in marked contrast to previous seasonality studies of sleep. Previous studies reporting seasonal variations in sleep and insomnia might have been subject to publication biases and lack of blinding to the research hypothesis.

This doesn’t mean SAD doesn’t exist. But if you can’t find seasonal sleep variation in 40,000 people, it probably doesn’t exist. If prolonged sunlight during long extreme-north summer days makes it harder to sleep normally, then people must have adjusted (e.g. blinds that actually block the light).

Disclaimer: I play piano.

A new study (abstract here; summary here) argues that musicians have more highly developed brains than the rest of us. The research relates the concept of high mind development to the potential to become really good at something:

New research shows that musicians’ brains are highly developed in a way that makes the musicians alert, interested in learning, disposed to see the whole picture, calm, and playful. The same traits have previously been found among world-class athletes, top-level managers, and individuals who practice transcendental meditation.

Using EEG‘s to measure brain activity, researchers concluded the following about the brains of musicians:

They have well-coordinated frontal lobes. Our frontal lobes are what we use for higher brain functions, such as planning and logical thinking. Another characteristic is that activity at a certain frequency, so-called alpha waves, dominates. Alpha waves occur when the brain puts together details into wholes. Yet another EEG measure shows that individuals with high mind brain development use their brain resources economically. They are alert and ready for action when it is functional to be so, but they are relaxed and adopt a wait-and-see attitude when that is functional.

Musicians also exhibited higher levels of moral reasoning and had more frequent “peak experiences”– intense moments of happiness and feelings of transcending limitations.

(via Frakonomics)

Probably the same can be found in anyone who tries hard to do well at a complex task e.g. acting or mathematics (which isn’t to say that certain facilities aren’t unique in music or sport or politicking, as opposed to purely intellectual pursuits).

Vul and Pashler’s paper on guessing, which I thought would be fun to share; perhaps you missed it initially as I did. Consider this question:

“What percentage of the world’s airports are in the USA?”

The idea is to guess at the answer. Then take a minute, drink a soda or a cup of coffee, and make another guess. The claim is that the average of the two guesses is usually more accurate the original guess. They show by an empirical study that the increase in accuracy is about 6.5 percent. Waiting weeks ups the accuracy much more—the claim is it is now about 16 percent. Here is a chart from their paper:

First, read the graph (bigger bar = more error). The second guess is worse than the first. But the average is better.

It’s well known that the average of several experts’ estimates is more reliable than a randomly selected expert’s.

I’m skeptical about the 3-week delay; if just a few subjects sought out information about the question on the web, then that could explain the difference. However, it makes sense that the first estimate probably anchors the second with immediate re-guessing. Probably the weeks-delayed re-guess is indeed superior even if the person isn’t exposed to new information in the interim.

I’d like to compare the average of two quick guesses with one well-considered guess (similar energy expenditure).

(via rjlipton)

p.s. don’t use bar graphs if the origin isn’t 0; it’s misleading

Thanks, Wikipedia.

 An English non-restrictive relative clause is preceded by a pause in speech or a comma in writing, whereas a restrictive clause normally is not. Compare the following sentences, which have two quite different meanings, and correspondingly two clearly distinguished intonation patterns, depending on whether the commas are inserted:

(1) The builder, who erects very fine houses, will make a large profit. (non-restrictive)

(2) The builder who erects very fine houses will make a large profit. (restrictive)

(1) The building company, which erects very fine houses, will make a large profit. (non-restrictive)

(2) The building company that|which erects very fine houses will make a large profit. (restrictive)

Of the two, only which is at all common in non-restrictive clauses.

(apparently Americans favor using “that” where possible - a partial victory for the prescriptivists?)

“When a comma can be inserted, the word is which.”^[6] A simple test is to consider whether the clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence and whether removing it significantly changes the meaning of the sentence; if so, usethat. For example:

(1) The pitch that changed the outcome of the game came in the eighth inning.

(2) The fateful pitch, which came on a 2-1 pitch, struck the batter.

and of course,

Jack built the house that I was born in.

Jack built the house I was born in.

(“zero relative pronoun”)

(“that” is also a determiner, e.g. “That dog died.”)

This new study (via NY Times) shows that within a year of liposuction, women regained all the weight and fat cells, but distributed elsewhere, since liposuction destroys the substrate under the skin on which fat cells grow.

Background knowledge: fat cells produce hormones that affect hunger and metabolism (resisitin, adiponectin, and leptin). A depleted fat cell “wants” to be filled. Excessively fat people often end up with diabetes and heart failure. They also really experience more physical hunger.

I have 70% belief in the following: if you overfill your fat cells, then the total number of fat cells increases (more or less permanently; they are replaced one for one as they die off). If you boost your peak number of fat cells, you will always have that peak number when you lose weight; they’ll just be emptier and causing you more hunger.

Tendencies to “put on weight” first in one location or another are at least partly due to the larger number of fat cells there.

A new theory proposed by the study authors (I don’t believe the evidence proves it yet): the body has some homeostasis in terms of the number of fat cells - if you destroy fat cells, it will add more (other than you’d expect from overeating so that existing fat cells are full). If this is true, they should be able to find something produced by each fat cell that doesn’t depend on its fullness (as well as the mechanism regulating fat cells birth as a function of that signal). I think this because if the same intensity of hormonal signaling can be caused e.g. by 2 full fat cells as 1 empty one then the liposucked women would be able to avoid growth of new fat cells by leaving those cells empty (which would require a change in their diet). In other words, I’m not sure how the authors ruled out the obvious explanation that the previously fat women continued overeating after the liposuction.

It is interesting at least, to know for sure that there’s not much obstacle to putting on a ton of fat anywhere and everywhere - that it’s probably not much harder to add 30lbs of fat to just the upper body (assuming full-lower-body-liposuction) than it is to add 30lbs distributed evenly (no liposuction).

Still beautiful: http://saganseries.com/

It’s unlikely that humans will live around other stars, ever. But it sure is possible and fun to imagine. How many intelligent alien species are there, ever existing or now existing? Fun to consider, especially since the answer to both questions could possibly be zero, but not necessarily fewer than billions (even though we haven’t yet found a single one).

Also, it’s hard to predict whether sending obvious signals of our existence and nature at lightspeed will yield good or bad results if and when we’re contacted by aliens. But I’m inclined to believe that, even though we don’t have the ability to hide completely, we should try to hide. This means at least making our wireless data signals look like constant noise (something that happens automatically if you’re trying to maximize signal bandwidth given limited EM spectrum). There’s definitely nothing wrong with listening in case any other species was so bold as to not hide.

from Tyler Cowen on Compassion, by the Pound - The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare

2. Fifty-five percent of Americans believe that housing chickens in cages is not humane (p.344).

3. The market share of cage-free eggs has never exceeded two percent (p.261).

People sure do pretend to care about things that they actually don’t care about.

Robin Hanson - generates new ideas at a rapid clip. He’s reckless. I like him that way.

Eliezer Yudkowsky - rhetoric in favor of reason (along with some interesting advocacy against careless AI research, which may one day become relevant). Also, fan fiction.

Katja Grace - apparently a philosophy student. Sometimes brilliant.

Seth Roberts - quirky self-experimentation - e.g. butter makes your brain faster?

(this is not exhaustive)

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/even-great-mathematicians-guess-wrong/

Easy to follow. Well told. Satisfying.

I’ve always enjoyed the right kind of sadness. It’s bliss to me. This and the aftermath of lovemaking:

 An excellent study published in 2006 compared two groups of people at risk for heart disease: those given a high dose of statins and those given a low dose. The high dose reducd LDL cholesterol levels; as it was meant to; the low dose did not. But there was no effect on coronary heart disease progression. After a year of statins, persons in both groups had increased their coronary artery calcification score by the same amount — about 25%. Totally contradicting the cholesterol hypothesis.

From Seth Roberts, who eats half a stick of butter a day, and after a year of that (for whatever reason) his coronary artery calcification score decreased 24%.

(LDL is the “bad” cholesterol)

I’ve been increasing my butter intake (because of supposed benefits on memory recall speed) and I haven’t felt sluggish or unhealthy. After a few months, my overall cholesterol was slightly “high” but the “good” to “bad” ratio was very favorable. I haven’t managed close to half a stick (1/4 cup) daily; that’s a lot of work. It’s nice to imagine that something delicious might be good for you (thus the popularity of dark-chocolate-benefits research and the like).

If you substitute lard or coconut oil instead of butter, which should be similarly high in saturated fat, the improvement vanishes. So it’s not just caused by increased fat or calories.

The Lives of Others (2006) was more to me than just a story about the East German secret police. It’s better than any of the great movies released last year (King’s Speech, Animal Kingdom, Winter’s Bone, Black Swan). It also has one of my favorite movie sex scenes (“presumably, they have intercourse”).

Rampage (2009) was exuberant and creepy, but the directing was not, as many reviewers claimed, great, or even good. The final epilogue should definitely have been cut. End instead on Brendan Fletcher (who was awesome) talking to his parents instead. Also, I would not have played the bingo scene for laughs - too out of character.

Never Let Me Go was dull but not awful. I loved the book. The movie’s story would be a little muddled unless you’ve read the book. But if you’ve read the book, you don’t need the movie. The scenario makes little sense (also a problem with the book). I also didn’t understand why the movie captions gave years like 1980; it should be future-science-fiction, since it has human cloning.

Now Robin Hanson wonders if our relatively independent are implicated in human hypocrisy:

Although human language allowed egalitarian rules whose uniform enforcement would have greatly reduced the advantages to big-brain conniving, humans had the biggest brains of all to unequally evade such rules. (more)

As with most lying or self-deception, homo hypocritus faces a serious implementation problem: how to keep the lies it tells separate from the “real” beliefs on which it acts. Since brains tend to be liberal with interconnections, there is a real risk of cross-talk between contradictory sets of opinions; lies may infect beliefs, and beliefs may infect lies.

I’ve previously discussed one solution: have the different sets of opinions apply to different topics. For example, hold socially-acceptable opinions on far topics, where the personal consequences of actions tend to be smaller, and keep more realistic opinions on near topics, where such consequences tend to be larger. Yes there’s a risk others may notice that you change opinions without good reason as items move from near to far or far to near, but that may be a relatively small price to pay.

A different solution is to have two distinct processing centers, each highly-connected internally, but with only modest between-center connections. One center would manage a coherent set of lies, while the other managed a coherent set of true beliefs. And in fact real brains have exactly this architecture! Left and right brains are highly connected internally, but only modestly connected to each other. Does the left brain manage a coherent set of overt opinions, while the right brain manages a coherent set of covert opinions? Consider:

1. In all vertebrates left brains tend to control routine behavior (e.g. feeding) while right brains tend to respond to unusual events (e.g. fight/flight).
2. Left brains tend to initiate actions, via positive feelings, while right brains tend to inhibit actions, via negative feelings.
3. Compared to other primates, left vs. right human brains differ a lot more in function.
4. The left human brain manages language’s literal quotably-overt syntax, vocabulary, and semantics, while the right brain handles language’s less-socially-verifiable tone, accent, metaphor, allegory, and ambiguity.
5. Split brain patients show that left brains are adept at making up respectable explanations for arbitrary right brain behavior.
6. Right brains tend to be used more in crafting lies, and they can readsubtle emotion clues better.
7. Left brain damage tends to distort behavior in more obvious and understandable ways.
8. Left brains emphasize decision-making, fact retrieval, numbers, and careful sequenced acts like throwing, while right brains emphasize art, music, spatial manipulation, and recognizing of shapes, patterns, and faces.

It seems that in most animals, left brains tend to manage and initiate actions within the current mode, while right brains watch in the background for patterns and reasons to veto current actions and switch modes. In humans, it seems the current-action-sequencer brain half was recruited to focus more on managing overt rule-following language, decisions, and actions, ready to explain away any apparent rule-violations. The less-introspectively-accessible pattern-recognizing background-watcher brain half, in contrast, was apparently recruited to focus on harder-to-testify-on-and-so-more-easily-covert meaning, opinion, and communication, including art and music.

It makes sense to me that the most effective politicians might be independently gauging and planning social moves, while the analytical/verbal part supplies at least competent pattern-matching impression of being fully engaged only in honest problem solving and assessment. That normal people don’t do this very well just means that modern life forgives a bit of laziness. Salesmen, politicians, church leaders, teachers, negotiators, even effective internet-daters … I’d expect all of those to have well-practiced parallel processing of social context alongside the content of the overt communication in that context. Maybe some people get by with carefully considered moves constructed offline, but that’s far less powerful than true extemporaneous ability.

It’s not terribly important whether some of this multitasking is left/right brain, but it would be nice to see physical confirmation (what’s going on in brain scans of effective vs. ineffective schmoozers at the same physical arousal/confidence level?).

Neurobiologists at the 

University of Southern California 

have demonstrated that mice show significant brain damage after short-term exposure to vehicle pollution, including signs associated with memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers recreated air with freeway particulate matter under controlled laboratory conditions. They used brain cells in vitro as well as live mice. The particulate matter measured up to 200 nanometers in width.

They found that neurons involved in learning and memory showed significant damage; the mouse brains showed signs of inflammation associated with premature aging and Alzheimer’s disease; and neurons from developing mice did not grow as well.

Live mice get slightly brain damaged from freeway air. Now I partly regret attending USC (the air was much worse toward downtown LA 15 years ago). Of course, humans may be more robust, but I doubt it.

Via Steve Sailer:

Steve Hsu has a fascinating post on a new paper by Nobel laureate economist/statistician James Heckman on the historic 1921 Terman Project tracking more than 600 California white males with 135+ IQs over seven decades.  You often hear about how this project shows that IQ doesn’t matter because, say, none of Terman’s Termites ever won the Nobel Prize.

Heckman writes:

The Effects of Education, Personality, and IQ on Earnings of High-Ability Men 

This paper estimates the internal rate of return (IRR) to education for men and women of the Terman sample, a 70-year long prospective cohort study of high-ability individuals. The Terman data is unique in that it not only provides full working-life earnings histories of the participants, but it also includes detailed profiles of each subject, including IQ and measures of latent personality traits. Having information on latent personality traits is significant as it allows us to measure the importance of personality on educational attainment and lifetime earnings.

Heckman explains:

4.1 The Total Effect of Personality and IQ on Lifetime Earnings 

We begin by analyzing how personality and IQ influence lifetime earnings. We use the sum of each individual’s earnings from age 18 to age 75. … With this simple regression, Conscientiousness and Extraversion are positively associated with earnings, while Agreeableness and Openness are negatively associated with earnings (although Openness fails to be statistically significant in this very simple exercise). Our measure of Neuroticism does not have a clear association with earnings. It is remarkable that even in this very high-IQ sample, where the range of observed IQs is clearly restricted, IQ still has a positive and statistically highly significant association with lifetime earnings.

This sounds about right from my long observations of highly successful entrepreneurs in a cognitively demanding field (market research): they were Intelligent (probably in the 125-160 range), Extraverted (good salesmen), Conscientious (i.e., hard-working), not too Neurotic (if they worried more about what could go wrong, they wouldn’t start companies), and not too Agreeable (they could kick ass when necessary, and were very competitive – raced yachts, drove imported Porsches that took six months to make street legal in the U.S.). They were probably more Open than average, although that has to do with them being entrepreneurs.

Heckman goes on. 

Finally, note that even when controlling for rich background variable [such as education], IQ maintains a statistically significant effect on lifetime earnings. Even though the effect is slightly diminished from the uncontrolled association of the first column, it is still sizeable. Malcolm Gladwell claims rather generally in his book “Outliers” that for the Terman men, IQ did not matter once family background and other observable personal characteristics were taken into account. While we do not want to argue that IQ has a larger role for the difference between 50 and 100, for example, than for the difference between 150 and 200, we do want to point out that even at the high end of the ability distribution, IQ has meaningful consequences.

In other words, people with 200 IQs will, on average, make more money than people with 150 IQs, all else being equal.

For these very smart termites, getting more education increases lifetime income.

One caveat about causality is in order… We partially follow this approach by using early measures of Openness and Extraversion. However, the other personality traits are measured at a time where the men are already in their working lives. Thus, these measures are more relevant to the observed earnings, but at the same time we cannot exclude the possibility that, for example, a high score on Neuroticism is a result of one’s position in the workforce. 

In other words, Terman asked personality questions back in 1922 of the youths that map well onto today’s Big 5 personality traits of Openness and Extraversion, but the project didn’t get around for a decade or two to asking questions that map to the other three Big personality components: Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. For example, my dad spent 40 years as a stress engineer at Lockheed worrying about whether the wings would snap off planes. Did he get into that career to start with because he always was a worry wart, or is he a worry wart today because he spent 40 years worrying about how to keep planes from crashing?

You can read the whole study 

here.

I always thought that I’d make more money by skipping grad school. But here I am doing academic research for not as much money as finance or silicon valley would provide … something is wrong. Either I love money, or I love academic research, or I’m happily lazy.

My favorite idea generator, Robin Hanson, says:

I’ve argued that though humans language allowed egalitarian rules whose uniform enforcement would have greatly reduced the advantages to big-brain conniving, humans had the biggest brains of all to unequally evade such rules. Since rules to share food and other material goods are among the most important egalitarian rules, I find it fascinating to see the details of how modern foragers evade such rules:

Below the melody line in praise of generosity … a grumbling about their stinginess, neglect, and ingratitude also was evident. Public pressure on individual Anbara to share was virtually irresistible, so various counterstrategies were adopted by the diligent to prevent exploitation by the lazy or manipulative. The most effective of these, in Hiatt’s view, was eating during food collection so that the greater part of a person’s produce was in an advanced state of digestion by the time he or she returned to camp. …

Among adult men, demands for spears and other items of material culture were frequent, and two interesting strategies were used to avoid having to meet them. Valued spears or guns could be given to elderly women by their sons or other male relatives or purchased by such women with their pension checks, although the women never used the weapons for hunting. … It … allowed the person who was using the gun or spear, and who normally had it in their possession all the time, to refuse demands for it because it was not his to give. The other strategy relates most frequently to pipes and tobacco, but can be extended to almost anything. Old men, by carving sacred designs on their pipes and then covering them with strips of cloth or paperback, render them taboo to all women and any men who has not had the design revealed to him in a religious context. …

When a child cries out for food from someone nearby, he or she will be given it; but then others nearby will in turn start asking the child for some of it, often taking it from the child’s hand, explaining their relationship as they take the food: “Oh, I’m your big sister/big brother; you’ve got to give food to me.” …

[Sharing] demands can be refused. This can usually be done only by hiding, secretive behavior, and lying. … Such hiding is widespread and is a fully self-conscious strategy. … It is not only potential givers who hide resources, but also potential receivers, who hide what they have so that they may ask others because they are seen to have a need. Myers records how, after reacting angrily to a demand for cigarettes from a Pintupi man, he was surprised by the man not taking offense at his anger, but instead sympathizing with the fact that Myers had been taken advantage of. He told Myers that he should not give things away so easily and instructed him on how to hide a packet of cigarettes in his socks so that he could tell people he had none. Also, he gave Myers a packet of cigarettes and told him he had several others buried near his camp. …

This is, then, a society with collective appropriation of game, … true primitive communalism. Despite this communalism, evidence for the distribution of meat by age and sex … shows that distribution practices advantage senior men and disadvantage elderly women. … Formal [meat] sharing rules there allocate only about half the maximum number of basic cuts, leaving up to 50 percent by weight unallocated, and that where a capable hunter was not pulling his weight, meat was withheld from him, occasioning a dispute. …

“One of the least pleasing features of savage life is the quarrelling that results from dissatisfactions over food sharing”. … Over 60 percent of the topics in a sample of everyday !Kung conversations related to food and complaints about people’s generosity. Game sharing is nowhere near as rule-bound as many accounts suggest. …

Myers recounts a case where the male leader … hid cooked meat in a flour drum on hearing of the arrival of his close and generous relatives from a nearby community. One of them came across and asked whether he had any meat, to which he replied that he was empty-handed. The visitor clearly did not believe him in light of the evidence of cooking strewn about, and he proceeded – without rancor – to open various flour drums lying around until he found the meat. … [This] did not lead to a repudiation of relatedness nor create conflict, because he had been generous enough in the past. …

The stresses of having too many social relationships to negotiate leads people to try to reduce demands by retreating into smaller groups, being passive in sharing, and keeping production to a minimum. … Interviewing informants about their practices … tends to put them on their best behavior and leads them to present a normative account. Such accounts are often neat and tidy and can mesh with romanticized views of other ways of life, thus reinforcing them, as in the case of game-sharing rules. …

Demand sharing is a complex behavior that is not predicated simply on need. Depending on the particular social context, it may incorporate one, some, or all of the following elements. It may in part be a testing behavior to establish the state of a relationship in social systems where relationships have to be constantly produced and maintained by social action and cannot be taken for granted. It may in part be assertive behavior, coercing a person into making a response. It may in part be a substantiating behavior to make people recognize the demander’s rights. And, paradoxically, a demand in the context of an egalitarian society can also be a gift: it freely creates a status asymmetry, albeit of varying duration and significance. (more)