Jim Munroe is on to something...

Just hours after finishing Everyone in Silico, I was led (thanks to Zoe Pollock) to an article in Scientific American, in which researchers performed three tests with statistically large groups of people, giving them free sunglasses while informing half the recipients that their glasses were expensive designer models, and the other half that the glasses were cheap knockoffs of expensive designer models. Both groups, in fact, had received the real thing.

In three seperate tests, the two groups were asked to perform tasks that allowed for some cheating. 30% of the group told their glasses were real cheated. 70% of those who believed they were wearing counterfeits cheated.

In a follow-on test with another group, those told they were wearing counterfeits were more likely to assess their peers as less truthful and trustworthy than those wearing the original thing.

The researchers concluded:

Wearing counterfeit goods not only fails to bolster our ego and self-image the way we hope, it actually undermines our internal sense of authenticity. "Faking it" makes us feel like phonies and cheaters on the inside, and this alienated, counterfeit "self" leads to cheating and cynicism in the real world.

Video games may get away with phony reality because they're not phony of and by themselves; you're have an authentic gaming experience, and you don't expect it to be real life.

This is why kids can, and do, play violent video games without as much scarring on their souls as the anxious morality mavens of our culture would have us believe.

Porn isn't inauthentic-- most of the time you're watching people have a genuine good time, even if it's a professional good time. What is inauthentic is having only porn to go on when you try and adapt what you know to real, human partners. What's inauthentic is acting like you know how to push the other person's buttons when you truly have no clue.

There's a megaton of inauthenticity in our lives. It took us forever to show Yamaraashi-chan the disconnect between the inauthenticity of television and her own experiences in real life. Munroe wrote a book about how different people make that distinction. And now research shows that knowingly putting up an inauthentic front corrodes your own soul and your sense of self-worth.

Omaha makes an interesting point: what if the researchers had brought the women back the next day, and told them they'd made a mistake and given them the other set of glasses? And then run through the tests again? I'd like to see those results.

The Ol' Straitjacket...

It's often been said that if straight men could reliably get from the object of their attraction what gay men get, reliable, relentless, reciprocated, active desire with understood and appreciated feedback, they'd whine a lot less. (Of course, this assumes that women are exactly like men, and lesbian relationships would in general look much more like gay male relationships, which of course is not the real world.)

Recently, the press has been handwringing that we're trying to straitjacket women into a role like that of gay men, where they're expected to be all of the things I described above without bringing any feminine qualities to they're relationships whatsoever. The "Hook-up" culture, the pundits have warned, is all about having sex, and devastates any potential for a meaningful relationship among the participants. And several studies have shown that yes, people who hook up tend to break up at a statistically higher rate than those who wait to have sex.

And the evolutionary psychologists over in the corner have talked about "strategies" for our Darwinian success as a species, and pointed out that there are two standard foci around which reproductive strategies converge: high-investment and low-investment. "High investment" strategies emerge during periods of sufficient resource: because there's enough food, parents put much effort into fewer "high-quality children" while ensuring that those those resources are secured for the familial gene pool for future generations. "Low investment" strategies emerge during periods of strife and famine, when women bear the brunt of genetic scattering, having many "low-quality children" in the hopes that some will survive to adulthood and carry the selfish familial genes on.

What seems obvious is that some percentage of women will be optimized for one strategy over another, and find themselves mis-fit to the strategy indicated by resource availability. This is a long-winded way of getting around to saying: hey, some women are happy being promiscuous. Just like some men are happy being monogamous.

University of Iowa researcher David Paik asked a rather obvious question: if we take those women out of the studies about hook-ups, what do we see? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that people who hook-up are just as likely to have meaningful long-term relationships as those who delay sex.

It seems to me we're seeing an echo of the ancient "Madonna or Whore" story, only this time the echo is weaker. Maybe someday we'll be able to just let people enjoy themselves. The barriers to sexual satisfaction, such as disease or accidental pregnancy, can be mitigated, and hopefully eliminated someday.

The cynic in me believes that will probably be about the same time that sufficiently advanced sexual surrogates will exist such that "real sex," with another human being, with his or her sweat and bodily fluids, his or her own competing desires and agendas, will be another kink, an option taken only by the masochistic.

Nope. Doesn't ring a bell.

Nope, I have never, ever, ever worked at a software development company like this: The Half-Assed Agile Software Development Manifesto.

Nope, nope, nope.

The astonishing thing is that somehow, companies that do develop this way often succeed in muddling through anyway.