Isegoria

Once the Soviet Union was destroyed, the British would see reason and give in

August 24th, 2021

After citing the introduction to Bevin Alexander’s How Hitler Could Have Won World War II, I naturally had to go ahead and read the whole book, in which he explains how, after it had achieved the most spectacular, rapid, and overwhelming military victory in the twentieth century, the Reich destroyed itself by attacking the Soviet Union directly:

Hitler came to this decision by an incredibly convoluted and illogical process. Since Britain refused to sign a peace treaty, and since invading Britain would be extremely hazardous given the strength of the Royal Navy and the weakness of the German navy, Hitler concluded that the only way to overcome Britain would be to destroy the Soviet Union. Hitler decided that Russia was Britain’s chief remaining hope for assistance, its “continental dagger,” and once the Soviet Union was destroyed, the British would see reason and give in.

[...]

A war against Russia would be nothing like the war in the west, where distances were limited, populations concentrated, objectives close, and the Atlantic Ocean a finite boundary.

Posted in Policy, War | 84 Comments »

He had no idea how to go on and bring the war to a victorious conclusion

August 23rd, 2021

When I recently noted that Hitler’s strategy through mid-1940 was almost flawless, it wasn’t because I had just read How Hitler Could Have Won World War II, but because I was reading William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and it kept making points that seemed familiar from my long-ago skimming of the intro to Bevin Alexander’s book:

In truth neither Hitler, the High Command nor the general staffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had ever seriously considered how a war with Great Britain could be fought and won. Now in the midsummer of 1940 they did not know what to do with their glittering success; they had no plans and scarcely any will for exploiting the greatest military victories in the history of their soldiering nation.

This is one of the great paradoxes of the Third Reich. At the very moment when Hitler stood at the zenith of his military power, with most of the European Continent at his feet, his victorious armies stretched from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Atlantic to beyond the Vistula, rested now and ready for further action, he had no idea how to go on and bring the war to a victorious conclusion.

[...]

The Germans, despite their vaunted military talents, lacked any grand strategic concept. Their horizons were limited — they had always been limited — to land warfare against the neighboring nations on the European Continent. Hitler himself had a horror of the sea and his great captains almost a total ignorance of it.

[...]

There was of course another alternative open to the Germans. They might bring Britain down by striking across the Mediterranean with their Italian ally, taking Gibraltar at its western opening and in the east driving on from Italy’s bases in North Africa through Egypt and over the canal to Iran, severing one of the Empire’s main life lines. But this necessitated vast operations overseas at distances far from home bases, and in 1940 it seemed beyond the scope of the German imagination.

Posted in Policy, War | 16 Comments »

When you add stress to the equation, women are far more likely to overload

August 22nd, 2021

Estrogen’s effect on the COMT (Warrior-Worrier) process is quite dramatic, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing explains:

It slows down dopamine reabsorption by 30%, regardless of which genotype a woman is.

[...]

When you add stress to the equation, women are far more likely to overload.

[...]

Lighthall and Mather found that the differences between men and women were very small when they just came into the lab and played the [risk-taking] game. But if they first had to submerge a hand in ice water, then play, the differences were dramatic. Women took less risk after being stressed; they made decisions more slowly and earned less money for themselves. Meanwhile, for men, the stress actually improved their performance. They took more risk, and it was smart risk — the stressed men earned more money overall. They also made faster decisions.

[...]

For women, the emotional regions of the brain increased activity after stress; their decision making became entangled with their emotions. But for men, there was no increase in emotionality — stress made them more calculated.

In further research, the scholars found that, in the back of our brains, in the optical cortex, there’s a region where we process the visual look on faces, to read the subtle cues of mood. When women have been stressed, this region markedly increases its activity, but in men, the activity in that region is suppressed.

Under stress, men’s brains tune out emotional cues. Women under stress seek out the emotional cues.

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

The U.S. military should stop being one of the best suppliers of tactical instruction to the bad guys

August 20th, 2021

The bad guys are getting better at basic tactics:

Consider Boko Haram. Having only launched its military campaign in 2009, it has already mastered the use of coordinated fire and maneuver elements at the tactical level to execute complex raids, ambushes, assaults, and even withdrawing by echelon when on the defensive. It even staged an amphibious assault that overran a Nigerien Army garrison on an island in Lake Chad. Another example is from much closer to the U.S. homeland. Utilizing tactics diffused through U.S. military training, drug cartels such as the infamous “Zetas” and “Jalisco New Generation” have institutionalized combat training that allows them to regularly wreak havoc on Mexican security forces. In the wake of a recent downing of a Mexican military helicopter through the employment of rocket-propelled grenades, the disturbing discovery was made of tactical gear emblazoned with “CJNG – High Command Special Forces” (Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion). Further evidence comes from the Iraqi campaign to defeat ISIL. Conventional forces struggled mightily to eject ISIL from Iraq’s territory, and only succeeded due to the heavy use of Iraqi special operations forces and liberal American airpower. The battle of Mosul, for example, lasted for nine months despite significant material U.S. support and a 20:1 force ratio against the ISIL defenders. Afghan conventional military forces are often defeated by an increasingly competent Taliban. On the other side of the world, Filipino forces had to destroy much of the town of Marawi to liberate it from jihadist insurgents during a five-month siege last year. Furthermore, these enemies seem to be gravitating towards operations in urban areas. These environments hinder the United States and its partners from utilizing their high-tech advantages, resulting in a playing field that could get ever more level. Finally, given the ease with which such groups can infiltrate poorly vetted partner forces, the U.S. military has probably provided tactical instruction to the enemy directly and indirectly for a long time. As one U.S. military advisor in Afghanistan told one of us: “Sometimes a trainee just doesn’t show up right before graduation, and then – sure enough – you are fighting him on the next objective.”

In summary, rather than celebrating the (shockingly slow) destruction of the ISIL caliphate, the U.S. military should realize that one of its enemies just learned a whole lot about combat: basic infantry tactics, urban operations, and the clever blending of emerging technologies. These lessons will spread globally, and faster than many expect.

What should be done in response? First, the United States has to recognize that the bad guys will get better. Rather than perpetuating the comforting myth that enemy ranks are saturated with incompetent wackos, planners and policymakers must understand that these groups have highly motivated and – with the right training – potentially capable fighters.

Second, we need to remember that humans are more important than hardware. The welter of debate over high technology widgets has obscured the fact that technologies are leveraged by individuals and organizations. Biddle wrote a prescient article back in 1996 entitled “Victory Misunderstood” about the implications of the 1991 Gulf War in which he challenged the hypothesis that technology would be the deciding factor on 21st century battlefields. His analysis showed that basic soldiering skills were crucial to the lopsided victory over Iraqi forces. He argued that technology may simply “be magnifying the effects of skill differentials on the battlefield. If so, then a given skill imbalance may be much more important today than in the past”. We proposed a similar argument here. Therefore, the U.S. military needs to not only be wary of the changing skill sets of the enemies of the United States but also keep a similarly watchful eye over the maintenance of our own human capital. U.S. forces are only as good as the men and women they select, train, and develop.

As a consequence, the U.S. military should stop being one of the best suppliers of tactical instruction to the bad guys. Planners should be more discerning when it comes to building partner capacity. Additional scrutiny should be placed on which partner nation military units are being trained, what roles they will play in the fight, and how large and good they need to be. Most of these nations do not need a Western-style conventional military, but rather a politically reliable force dedicated to internal security and counter-terrorism. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, large (and probably unsustainable) conventional partner forces fight poorly (when they do fight) and, therefore, the specialized counter-terrorism and elite units U.S. mentors have carefully crafted are consistently overused as assault troops. In the words of another U.S. military advisor in Afghanistan, speaking of the country’s elite commando units: “Eight percent of the troops do 80 percent of the fighting.” Rather than choosing to train large numbers of poorly vetted partner conventional forces, the United States should probably choose to save such training (and resources) for smaller numbers of higher quality and better vetted forces. Such efforts will inevitably involve the diffusion of training and technology (and the risk of a future “Zetas” blowback). Therefore, the United States needs to be more mindful about who gets what, and for what purpose.

Posted in War | 10 Comments »

When you have just humiliated the lone superpower, you deserve to celebrate the occasion

August 19th, 2021

Next month is the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Z Man reminds us:

This is an important date for the Taliban, as it is when they stepped onto the world stage. What better way to celebrate the platinum anniversary of that event than to raise the Taliban flag atop the U.S. embassy on 9/11? That may seem a bit spiteful, but when you have just humiliated the lone superpower, you deserve to celebrate the occasion.

For its part, the foreign policy establishment seems to be in a state of hysterical confusion over this. They assumed the military refused to bugger out of Afghanistan when Trump ordered the retreat because they hated Trump as much as the rest of the cloud people. After all, who does not hate Trump? Now that the evil orange man is gone, it was time to get out of Afghanistan. What could go wrong?

It turns out that the military knew it was a house of cards. After all, it was their job to build the thing. It was their job to create the civil institutions that would become the cultural production centers, crowding out the old culture. They trained the military to defend those new institutions. The Afghan military would be the new model army for the region, built on the same principles as the imperial army. Instead, it has collapsed.

In the dreaded private sector, this degree of failure would result in the termination of the senior staff and a bankruptcy reorganization. That assumes anyone would think there is something worth salvaging. Anything created by the stupid people responsible for Afghanistan should be suspect. That is not how things work in the ruling class. The best part of being a cloud person is you never are held responsible for your actions.

Instead, the military brass will point the finger at the civilian side. They will say their hands were tied over political concerns. If only they were free to drop even more ordnance on the villages dotting the countryside, they could have whipped that ragtag band of goatherds. Of course, this will be followed with new requests for cash, accompanied by cheers from conservatives hoping to become relevant again.

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

Joe Biden unleashed his inner Pat Buchanan in a startlingly lucid speech

August 18th, 2021

Like the Wolverines in Red Dawn, Steve Sailer notes, the Taliban in Afghanistan live there:

Afghanistan might not be much, but it’s all they’ve got. Granted, Afghanistan is a crummy country with a comically awful culture. The revolution in ways of thinking that swept the West beginning in the 1200s has yet to arrive in much of Afghanistan.

But, for some people, it’s home.

In contrast, the Americans were always the invaders. Sure, the Taliban were criminally negligent accessories to 9/11 by hosting Osama bin Laden (although no evidence has since emerged that they knew of this specific enormity ahead of time). So, the U.S. had every right to engage in a butcher-and-bolt punitive expedition to overthrow the Kabul regime, which we succeeded in doing in a couple of months.

But then we hung around for twenty years trying to make ourselves popular. Of course, in a country teeming with young men (Afghanistan has the highest birth rate outside of sub-Saharan Africa), being an outsider roaring around on their home turf in our Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles is no way to make us loved. So, among the youth of the dominant Pashtun tribe, the Taliban tended to recruit the patriots while we wound up with the parasites.

[…]

Okay, but why didn’t self-interested Afghans at least want to be on our side in the long run? Because the Afghans knew we always had our own, much nicer country that we will eventually go home to, leaving them to the Taliban. As a rebel commander told an American in 2006, “You have all the clocks, but we have all the time.”

But in the meantime, the U.S. could hire collaborators to pretend to fight for whatever the Americans were in favor of at the moment—democracy, globalism, women going unmasked, everybody going masked, gay rights, black lives matter, you name it, somebody in Afghanistan would figure out an angle on how to skim off the budget for it. For twenty years, the leading economic activity in Afghanistan has been stuff falling off the back of American supply trucks.

But ultimately, some American president would grow sick of shoveling money into the maws of incredibly corrupt collaborators—like Captain Renault in Casablanca only much less charming—and bring our boys home. (And while Captain Renault was a man like any other man, only more so, around beautiful Bulgarian brides, America’s allies in Afghanistan tend to be into boy-molesting.)

That president turned out to be Joe Biden, who unleashed his inner Pat Buchanan in a startlingly lucid speech Monday denouncing our former allies in Afghanistan for not caring enough to fight.

[…]

As the end grew nigh, Afghan elites, seeing their gravy train was almost through, became even more rapacious and stole almost all the pay of soldiers and policemen. Moreover, no poor dumb Afghan is dumb enough to want to be the last man killed fighting to make Biden’s exit strategy look more graceful, especially since they weren’t paying him anymore.

[…]

Underlings figure out what the bosses don’t want to hear and then don’t tell them.

[…]

Lying isn’t just bad for the soul, it’s bad for effectiveness at dealing with reality. After 1991, we of course stopped winning wars. But now we can’t even avoid losing in spectacularly humiliating fashion. If there’s anything we’ve learned about the deep state from this episode, it’s that it’s real…and it’s inept.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Worriers can handle stress, and even outperform Warriors

August 18th, 2021

At Standford, Dr. Quinn Kennedy put pilots through a series of stressful simulator tests, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing explains, after checking the 172 pilots’ COMT genes:

From what we know so far, we would predict that the pilots with the Warrior gene would handle this chaos well. And they did. Even the recreational pilots, pure hobbyists with only a few hundred hours of flight experience and not yet rated for instrument flying at night or in fog, handled the simulator plane as well as professional pilots. As long as they had the Warrior gene.

[...]

The recreational pilots with the Worrier gene did melt down under the pressure, as predicted. The havoc of the simulator overwhelmed them — but the more flight experience they had, the better they handled it. The Worrier-gene pilots who were professionals did best of all. The increased pressure did not diminish their performance; instead, their genetically blessed working memory and attention advantage kicked in, until they surpassed the performance of all the Warrior pilots.

What this suggests is that Worriers can handle stress, and even outperform the Warriors, if they train themselves to handle the specific stress of certain recurring situations.

Posted in Science | 3 Comments »

That’s $300 million dollars per day

August 17th, 2021

In the 20 years since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent more than $2 trillion on the war in Afghanistan:

That’s $300 million dollars per day, every day, for two decades. Or $50,000 for each of Afghanistan’s 40 million people. In baser terms, Uncle Sam has spent more keeping the Taliban at bay than the net worths of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and the 30 richest billionaires in America, combined.

Those headline numbers include $800 billion in direct war-fighting costs and $85 billion to train the vanquished Afghan army, which folded in the weeks since the Pentagon’s sudden early July closure of Bagram Air Force Base eliminated the promise of air support against the advancing Taliban. U.S. taxpayers have been giving Afghan soldiers $750 million a year in payroll. All told, Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates the total spending at $2.26 trillion.

[…]

Naturally, the United States has financed the Afghan war with borrowed money. Brown University researchers estimate that more than $500 billion in interest has already been paid (included in the $2.26 trillion total sum), and they figure that by 2050 the cost of interest alone on our Afghan war debt could reach $6.5 trillion. That amounts to $20,000 for each and every U.S. citizen.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Now Ghani failed as the head of the state, together with the state he was the head of

August 16th, 2021

There are many ironies in the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Peter Turchin notes, but for him the main one is that Ashraf Ghani started as an academic who studied state collapse and nation building:

Back in 2008 I reviewed, for Nature, the book written by Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States. My review was not gentle. One of my comments was that the authors

review four examples — post-war Europe, Singapore, the southern United States and Ireland — that, in their opinion, prove that countries confronted with devastation, chaos and entrenched poverty can transform themselves into prosperous and stable members of the global community. Apart from Singapore, however, these are not examples of state collapse. Europe in 1945 was devastated by interstate war; Ireland was poor before its economic miracle but not a collapsed state; and few would consider the United States to be weak.

[….]

My review concluded that Fixing Failed States failed as an academic book. Now Ghani failed as the head of the state, together with the state he was the head of.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

It’s as if some of the A students and B students trade places when it’s test time

August 14th, 2021

In the ninth grade, all Taiwanese children take the Basic Competency Test (BCT), Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing explains, which determines if they’ll get to attend senior high school:

The questions are much harder than American SAT questions, perhaps more equivalent to what Americans might see during a college final exam. And the testing takes two days. Only 39% of all Taiwanese ninth-graders manage to pass. It’s enormously competitive and stressful.

[...]

In regular classroom work, on a daily basis, the Worriers have the advantage. Thanks to high dopamine levels, they have better memories and attention and a higher verbal IQ. They’re superior planners and can better orchestrate complex thought. But as the BCT nears, the pressure intensifies, and the hours spent studying grow.

[...]

The Worriers become distressed and frustrated: they become unable to switch strategies or see something in a new way. They have trouble integrating new information. They are prone to panic when given new directions, preferring to stick to familiar ways of solving problems.

[...]

The Worriers score about 8% lower than the Warriors. The Worriers struggle the most on the academic subjects that tax working memory the hardest: science, social science, and math.

It’s as if some of the A students and B students trade places when it’s test time.

Posted in Education, Science | 1 Comment »

The future elites actually practiced less on average in their eventual sport than the near-elites through most of childhood

August 13th, 2021

If you look at the average number of hours of deliberate practice between elite and near-elite athletes, David Epstein explains (in The Sports Gene), packing in practice is clearly important, but you need to look at the entire picture:

The future elites actually practiced less on average in their eventual sport than the near-elites through most of childhood. Only in the mid-teen years did they focus in on a single sport and begin racking up practice hours in earnest.

It could be that some eventual elites were simply more gifted and didn’t have to focus in as early.

Or, given the circa-puberty timing of the crossover in the above chart, the future near-elites may simply have been early developers who ceased to stand out when peers caught up physically, and subsequently the near-elites started throwing in the metaphorical towel.

Another possible explanation for this pattern is that early specialization actually hinders development in some sports.

[...]

[NBA MVP Steve] Nash followed a pattern that shows up repeatedly in studies of the childhoods of elite athletes: he had a “sampling period” through about age twelve, where he tried a variety of sports, found the one that best suited him — physically and psychologically — and then focused in during his mid-teen years and got down to business.

[...]

A Swedish study of sub-elite and elite tennis players — five of whom were ranked top fifteen in the world — found that the eventual sub-elites dropped all sports other than tennis by age eleven, whereas the eventual elites continued playing multiple sports until age fourteen. Only at fifteen did the future elites begin to practice more than the future sub-elites.

[...]

A study of the childhoods of musicians shows a similar pattern. In a paper titled “Biological Precursors of Musical Excellence,” psychologists John A. Sloboda and Michael J. A. Howe found that teenagers in a competitive music school who were deemed of “exceptional ability” had, prior to gaining entry to the school, sampled instruments and practiced less and had fewer lessons than students who were deemed of “average ability.” The average students accumulated 1,382 hours of play and practice on their first instrument prior to entering the school, compared to 615 hours for the exceptional students, who only focused on one instrument and ramped up their practice activities later. The average players, the psychologists wrote, “spent more total time on instrumental activity, but devoted the vast majority of their effort to the first chosen instrument.” That is, they stuck rigidly to a single path rather than embracing the sampling period during which athletes and musicians alike apparently often find the route that best fits their inimitable bodies and minds.

This led Epstein to write his next book, Range, which I also recommend — and which I’ve mentioned here before a few times.

Posted in Education, Fitness | 1 Comment »

Wearing cloth masks outdoors, far from other people, in the wind, as is the fashion in Palo Alto

August 12th, 2021

John Cochrane, the grumpy economist, can’t help but rant about covid incompetence:

Delta is the fourth wave of covid, and amazingly the US policy response is even more irresolute than the first time around. Our government is like a child, sent next door to get a cup of sugar, who gets as far as the front stoop and then wanders off following a puppy.

The policy response is now focused on the most medically ineffective but most politically symbolic step, mask mandates. All all-night disco in Provincetown turns in to a superspreader event so… we make school kids wear masks in outdoor summer camps? Masks are several decimal places less effective than vaccines, and less effective than “social distance” in the first place.* Go to that all night disco, unvaccinated, but wear a mask? Please.

If we’re going to do NPI (non pharmaceutical interventions), policy other than vaccines, the level of policy and public discussion has tragically regressed since last summer. Last summer, remember, we were all talking about testing. Alex Tabarrok and Paul Romer were superb on how fast tests can reduce the reproduction rate, even with just voluntary isolation following tests. Other countries had competent test and tracing regimes. Have we built that in a year? No. (Are we ready to test and trace the next bug? Double no.)

What happened to the paper-strip tests you could buy for $2.00 at Walgreen’s, get instant results, and maybe decide it’s a bad idea to go to the all night dance party? Interest faded in November. (Last I looked, the sellers and FDA were still insisting on prescriptions and an app sign up, so it cost $50 and insurance “paid for” it.) What happened to detailed local data? Did anyone ever get it through the FDA’s and CDCs thick skulls that even imperfect but cheap and fast tests can be used to slow spread of disease?

Last summer, we were talking about super-spreader events, and the idea that you don’t have to have disastrous lockdowns of everything but maybe packed all-night disco parties are a bad idea? (Reopen smart, I wrote at the time, for example here) Today, silence. Masks. Nice big symbolic masks. Period.

And then we indulge another round of America’s favorite pastime, answers in search of a question. Delta is spreading, so… extend the renter eviction moratorium.

[…]

In the talk “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” I hear, basically, resignation. We offered you vaccines. If you won’t take them, fine, we’re done. We’re back really to what quite a few people argued for and were pilloried for in March 2020. Let it sweep through, get to herd immunity, it peters out, bury the dead and go on with life.

The good news. A reproduction rate of 6 means Delta will spread really fast, peak really fast, and decline fast. The bad news: a lot of people will needlessly get sick and quite a few will die. The economy will slow down as people voluntarily pull back. Evolution got one more step ahead of bureaucratic bungling. A variant that transmits even more easily through vaccinated people can’t be far behind.

It did not have to happen. The vaccine was in hand, the lines were done, anyone could walk in and get the vaccine. All we had left to do was get pretty much everyone vaccinated before the new variant hit, and it would have been pretty much over. Something like $5 trillion dollars of extra debt, the economy closed for a year, thousands dead, thousands unemployed, huge pain and now we lose sight of the ball when all we had to do was pay a little attention, get some small incentives going for everyone to get vaccinated. (Aaron Stupple suggested, just pay people $1,000 to get vaccinated. 100 million people times $1,000 is $100 billion. Couch change in what the pandemic has cost us, or the upcoming $3.5 trillion “infrastructure” bill. That’s not much more than rail and transit subsidies alone.)

[…]

Of the many things we don’t know, just how much masks help or don’t help is one of them. You think with $42 billion dollars one could find out. Of the studies I have read and seen cited, I see a guesstimate of 20% reduction in reproduction rate. So if Delta has R0=6, masks might reduce that to 4.8. Even if a vaccine is only 50% effective in stopping transmission, then R0 among the vaccinated is 0.25.

Masks do much more to stop you from giving it to someone else than to protect you. Cloth masks are close to useless. Well-fitting N95 masks work much better in both directions. Neither comes close to vaccination. Wearing cloth masks outdoors, far from other people, in the wind, as is the fashion in Palo Alto, is just part and parcel of the pointless virtue-signaling so prominent here. If you do go to that crowded all-night disco, wearing an N95 mask might be a good idea. Of course if you’re even thinking about wearing a mask, you’re not going in the first place, which is why the whole mask-mandate business is a bit silly.

Posted in Economics, Science | 9 Comments »

People whose enzymes work slowly can’t handle the stress

August 10th, 2021

A single letter in your genetic code determines whether your COMT enzyme is hardworking or lazy, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing explains, and thus whether you are a Warrior or a Worrier:

The hardworking ones are precisely four times faster than the lazy ones. The hardworking enzymes are built with valine, the lazy enzymes with methionine.

[...]

In people of European descent, 50% have a combination of both slow and fast enzymes; 25% have only fast enzymes; and 25% have only slow enzymes.

[...]

For people whose enzymes work fast, their brains can handle the stress, because the enzymes can get rid of the extra dopamine.

[...]

People whose enzymes work slowly can’t handle the stress, because their enzymes can’t clear the dopamine. Their brains become overexcited, and they become overwhelmed.

[...]

The fast enzymes work so rapidly that when someone is not being stressed — when conditions are normal, and there’s just a normal dopamine turnover — the enzymes clear out too much dopamine.

[...]

They actually need the stress (and the dopamine) to get up to the optimal level of mental functioning.

[...]

On most days, having slow COMT enzymes is actually a good thing. But under stress and pressure, with that extra flood of dopamine, they crack.

[...]

The COMT gene for the fast-acting enzymes is one we share with chimps and apes — it’s been in human DNA forever. But the COMT gene for the slow-acting enzymes is ours alone; it’s a more recent entrant in the survival-of-the-fittest contest.

[...]

While you might think the Warriors are the aggressive ones, that’s not accurate. With higher levels of dopamine, the Worriers are always near the threshold for an aggressive response. It’s easy to set them off; they’re very temperamental. They get angry more easily and act out. But their aggression isn’t necessarily successful. The meaning of “successful aggression” is correctly reading and interpreting other people’s aggressive intentions, and matching them. Worriers tend to see aggression when it’s not there, and they miss it when it is. The Warriors are ready for the real thing.

[...]

For those with the “Warrior” gene, a majority had recovered from their PTSD. And after the researchers had reconstructed their history of trauma, the scholars learned that the Warriors had only developed PTSD after experiencing a number of traumatic incidents. For those with the “Worrier” gene, it was a different story. It had taken only a single traumatic event to cause severe PTSD symptoms. And the majority of the Worriers still had PTSD related to the trauma of the genocide. More than a decade later, they had not yet recovered.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Both warriors and worriers are needed in every society

August 9th, 2021

The gene that has been most studied for its involvement in pain modulation, David Epstein explains (in The Sports Gene), is the COMT gene, which is involved in the metabolism of neurotransmitters in the brain, including dopamine:

Two common versions of COMT are known as “Val” and “Met,” based on whether a specific part of the gene’s DNA sequence codes for the amino acid valine or methionine.

[...]

In both mice and humans, the Met version is less effective at clearing dopamine, which leaves higher levels in the frontal cortex. Cognitive testing and brain imaging studies have found that subjects with two Met versions — both animals and humans — tend to do better on and require less metabolic effort for cognitive and memory tasks, but that they are also more prone to anxiety and more sensitive to pain.

(Anxiety, or “catastrophizing,” is a strong predictor of an individual’s pain sensitivity.)

Conversely, Val/Val carriers seem to do slightly worse on cognitive tests that require rapid mental flexibility, but may be more resilient to stress and pain.

(They also get a better boost from Ritalin, which increases dopamine in the frontal cortex.)

[...]

David Goldman, chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, coined the phrase “warrior/worrier gene” to describe the apparent tradeoffs of the two COMT variants.

[...]

In the United States, Goldman says, 16 percent of people are Met/Met; 48 percent are Met/Val; and 36 percent are Val/Val, leading him to suggest that both warriors and worriers are needed in every society, so there is widespread preservation of both forms of the gene.

I didn’t remember this passage from my original reading of the hardback edition back in 2013 — because it wasn’t in there:

So, I’ve included a relevant passage that didn’t make it past the first draft of this book.

It is about the BDNF gene, which codes for its namesake protein: brain-derived neurotrophic factor. The gene comes in two common varieties, known as “val” and “met,” and a National Institute of Mental Health study found that individuals with the met version performed more poorly on tests that asked them to recall scenes they had been shown. Follow up studies suggest that BDNF may also impact the kind of “muscle memory” involved in sport skill acquisition: