Reading Notes 2018.10.20

Claude Lévi-Strauss today, by Dan Sperber

[p.72] Faithful to the terminology of Saussure, he [Levi-Strauss] tends to refer to symbolic phenomena as "signifiers," and one might assume that the investigation is into an underlying code which pairs these signifiers with their "signified." Yet, if readers begin looking for the signifieds, they soon realize that the underlying code relates signifiers to other signifiers: there are no signifieds. Everything is meaningful, nothing is meant.

[p.74] If the question asked were: "Why should a given social group consider itself to stand in a special relationship to, say, eagles?," only unsatisfactory answers could be given: "Because they are mistaken about ancestry," or "because they think they resemble eagles and assume this implies a relationship." Explaining strange behavior by even stranger intellectual errors is no explanation at all.

Levi-Strauss points out that the human-animal relationship can be understood in a third, even more systemic way: neither as a set of dyadic relationships between individual items, nor as a dyadic relationship between sets of individual items, but as a second-degree dyadic relationship between two sets of first-degree relationship:

On the one hand there are animals which differ from each other (in that they belong to distinct species, each of which has its own physical appearance and mode of life), and on the other hand there are men...who also differ from each other (in that they are distributed among different segments of the society, each occupying a particular position in the social structure.). The resemblance presupposed by so-called totemic representations is between these two systems of differences (Levi-Strauss 1963b: 77).

Seen in this light, the resource to animal species provides a unique system of differences. Species do not overlap, they look different, they live differently, they offer an endless choice of opposed features that can be used to contrast human groups......If, for instance, a tribe were divided into three clans named after the eagle, the bear, and the turtle, this might suggest that we concentrate on the natural element of each of these species, and further contrast the three clans as associated with sky, earth, and water.

# Christopher Chabris on "Collective intelligence & the ethics of A/B tests", from Rationally Speaking
--People who have good social and emotional skills enhance group intelligence more than experts of specific, technical fields.
--Women enhance group intelligence, but there may be a selection bias that the women got selected into the sample tend to be more intelligent than average women.