Iterative game of life

Came across an article on Psychology Today called Do Married Women Want Their Husbands to Cheat?.

Further to what the author says about women's choices in men, I would add that women have to choose a balance between these two extremes:

1. choose men who are not promiscuous because if he cheats on her, it will potentially divert his resources to other women's children
2. choose men who are promiscuous because it will benefit:
1. her sons because promiscuity will give her sons a reproductive advantage
2. her daughters because they will inherit his mother's "attraction to promiscuous men" genes and thus confer a reproductive advantage on her daughters

I chose to call this post "the iterative game of life" because it is reminiscent of the "prisoner's dilemma problem". The prisoners behave differently depending on whether every game is discrete and doesn't affect following games or whether the game is iterative. While the prisoners will act purely selfishly in the former case, they may tend to cooperate in the latter to avoid each punishing the other in successive games.

Similarly, evolution does not operate within a generation insulated from succeeding generations. If it did, then women would only choose non-promiscuous men. We all know that this is false in reality. A superior evolutionary strategy is to consider the effects in succeeding generations.

Which came first, beauty or intelligence?

I came across an article on Psychology Today, a blog post by the Scientific Fundamentalist called "Beautiful People Really ARE More Intelligent".

We all know that women care a great deal about their beauty, because they know what attracts men. And men care a great deal about status (which may be gotten by intelligence) because they know what attracts women.

Now this got me thinking: why was the title of the blog post worded "Beautiful People Really ARE More Intelligent"? It would be equally valid to say "Intelligent People Really ARE More Beautiful". After all, evolution is not directed, so intelligence is just a strategy, just like beauty. Neither one is better than the other. One (intelligence) is a strategy used by males to reproduce, and the other (beauty) is a strategy used by females to reproduce.

I mentioned in a previous blog post (Men are more intelligent than women) that intelligence is largely a male trait. It is more useful to men, but of little use to women when it comes to mating. The title might upset women, but there is really no reason to be upset. After all it is well known that women are more beautiful than men. It's just obvious enough that there isn't any need for a post to be written about it. And as I've mentioned, intelligence and beauty are just two different strategies.

While intelligence is of little use to women when it comes to mating, both beauty and intelligence are important for men. I shall explain why.

From the female's point of view, on the one hand she would like a provider and protector. A male with status fits the bill. But all else being equal, she will prefer the more beautiful male, because her daughters will have a beauty advantage if she mates with a beautiful man with status than a plain man with status. If the man's status is unknown, she will be attracted to beautiful males, because beauty is often an indicator of intelligence (and intelligence begets status). After all, his mother was beautiful, and so it was likely that she attracted an intelligent man with status.

So physical beauty in a man is preferred by women for two reasons:

1. As an indicator of intelligence (and thus status)
2. A beauty advantage for her daughters, so they will be able to attract (intelligent) men with status
3. Smarter men are more virile

Men on the other hand care little about a woman's intelligence because:

1. It is not necessary for a man to determine a woman's beauty and thus fertility indirectly through her intelligence - it's plain to see!
2. While mating with a intelligent woman would ensure that their sons had a reproductive advantage, it is likely that intelligence in a woman reduces her fertility.
3. Until fairly recently in human evolution, a man didn't need to pick and choose which woman he mated with. Because his investment in procreation was all of about 10 minutes, there was no need to pick and choose. Of course, with the advent of marriage and women as property, the environment changed but his brain didn't much.

This is all very hypothetical, so do post a comment if you have any thoughts.

Men are more intelligent than women (and women are more beautiful than men)

In all societies, intelligence can be an advantage for men because a more intelligent man has a greater ability to acquire status which enables him to attract more women and thus have more children. This status can be acquired by various means, such as strength, influence, wealth, etc. So for a man, more status means more fertility.

Since in the mating game it is women who choose men and not the other way around, the question of whether a man would prefer beauty or intelligence in a woman is somewhat beside the point. Also, since the game of life is about reproduction and not about intelligence nor beauty, a man would prefer beauty which correlates with fertility in women. Just as how women would prefer intelligence which correlates with fertility in men (but also beauty which is an indicator of intelligence in men). Which is not to say that intelligence is completely useless in a woman (because his sons would gain a reproductive advantage from his wife's intelligence genes), but intelligence is not an indicator of fertility in women (in fact it is the opposite).

Since the supply of women have always been less than demand, there has always been less evolutionary pressure on women to excel than on men. A woman has to literally do nothing to attract a man (she didn't have to be devious or clever in attracting a man), she has no real use for intelligence. Beauty on the other hand would give her an advantage in attracting men with status.

But then why did intelligence in women evolve at all? Since the more intelligent men were more likely to be successful in mating with women and having more offspring, children (both boys and girls) in the second generation inherited those intelligence genes from their fathers. These girls in the second generation, while being more intelligent (and numerous) than other girls who were the offspring of less intelligent men, nevertheless had no mating advantage over their less intelligent cousins. But a more intelligent man would have more luck with these second generation women than a less intelligent man would have with these women. So in the third generation as well, boys and girls possessing more intelligence would be more numerous.

So it seems that women's intelligence has always been dragged up by the men they mated with. And of course male beauty has always been dragged up by the females they mated with.

The IQ Uncertainty Principle

I realized something interesting about intelligence a while ago. It could have been a year ago - can't remember exactly.

The IQ Uncertainty Principle states that, you can't tell the difference between someone who's more intelligent than you and someone else who's less intelligent than you, simply by observing their behaviour (without knowing what effects their behaviour is causing). That is, they will both be behaving equally bizarrely. The difference is that one of them is aware of why they're doing it, and the other is not.

More formally, a person A with IQ "X" can't tell the difference between two other people, B whose IQ is "X+N" and C whose IQ is "X-N". Some examples:

1. A's IQ is 100, B's IQ is 120, C's IQ is 80. A can't tell who's more intelligent, B or C.
2. A's IQ is 120, B's IQ is 140, C's IQ is 100. Again, A can't tell who's more intelligent, B or C.
3. A's IQ is 90, B's IQ is 75, C's IQ is 105. Ditto.

However if B's IQ is "X+M" and C's IQ is "X-N" then A still doesn't know who's more intelligent - he only notices that one is behaving more bizarrely than the other. Examples:

1. A's IQ is 100, B's IQ is 90, C's IQ is 120. A notices that C is behaving more bizarrely than B, but doesn't know who's more intelligent.
2. A's IQ is 110, B's IQ is 120, C's IQ is 90. Ditto.

The difference, however, becomes apparent after the fact - if you can see the effects resulting from their behaviour. One of them will be seen to have "method in his madness", while the other will obviously be just plain mad, judging from the chaos left in his wake.

In many cases though, the behaviour and the effects of that behaviour cannot be separated from each other. If Mozart and a folk musician were to play the piano, it's easy to see who's more musically intelligent because the behaviour and the effect are inseparable (playing the piano and listening to the music). In other cases, there is often a significant time lag between the behaviour and the effect. Playing the stock market is one example.

Spreading a little happiness on the highway

This one time a couple of months ago, I was driving along on the highway (probably somewhere between Sydney and Canberra). My mind was quite active as usual. While observing the behaviour of my fellow drivers on the road, I realized something interesting. I'll tell you what it is, but first some background information to put it into context.

Generally on Australian roads the rule is, "keep left unless overtaking". The reason of course is to keep slow vehicles (vehicles travelling under the speed limit) in the left hand lane. If any vehicles are travelling at (or above) the speed limit, and they come up behind a slow vehicle, they use the right hand lane to overtake the slow vehicle(s). After overtaking, they return to the left hand lane.

Officially, you're not meant to drive in the right hand lane if the left hand lane is free, no matter what your speed is. Presumably if a cop sees you driving in the right hand lane for no good reason, he can fine you (although this has never happened to me, but more on that later).

Now, being a hypermiler, I sometimes choose to drive under the speed limit to save a bit of fuel. If the limit is 110 km/h, I sometimes drive at 100 km/h. The trouble with doing this is that this can be an annoyance to other drivers going at 110 km/h because they have to do an overtaking maneuver. I know this can be annoying because I myself do get annoyed when I'm driving quite fast to get somewhere in a hurry and come up behind a slow vehicle. It's doubly annoying if there are other cars around and you have to wait until it's clear, and then once you start to overtake, the slow vehicle speeds up! This tends to happen often on hills. A vehicle will slowly struggle to the top, and then as you're overtaking them, the hill crests and then the they speed up going downhill.

Anyway, back to the present. So I'm driving along at 100 km/h and I then realized that I would be less of an annoyance to other drivers if I was in the right hand lane. As long as there were few cars on the road, and most of them were travelling at the speed limit in the left hand lane, they could just speed past me and not have to worry about overtaking me. This strategy actually seemed to work quite well the last few times I've been to and from Sydney.

This strategy only works when the conditions are right:

1. There should be few cars on the road. If there are many cars on the road, then there will be a lot of overtaking going on, and all the lanes will probably just be full of cars. There will be lots of slower vehicles in the left hand lane and the right hand lane will be mostly populated by cars going quite fast, either overtaking (and returning to the left hand lane) or just plain trying to be somewhere in a big ol' hurry. Trying to drive slow in the right hand lane is obviously a bad idea in this situation.
2. There should be a fair amount of spacing between cars. A car is more likely to overtake another if they're close together. If the probability is high that an overtake is going to take place, you probably don't want to be in the right hand lane when it happens because you'll most likely be an annoyance.
3. Most cars should be going at the same speed. When cars are travelling at different speeds, there will be a lot of overtaking happening. In this situation, it is best to be in the left hand lane.

Sometimes you'll see a car coming up behind you travelling in the right hand lane the whole time. Just move to the left, wait for him to pass, then move back to the right. This is what I call an "undertake" maneuver.

So while the rule is called "keep left unless overtaking", a more accurate description that takes this strategy into account is "keep left unless travelling above or below the speed limit". But since it only works when all the conditions are right, there's no way to fit a description that takes all the factors into account on a road sign. But it's probably a bad idea for "normal people" to do this. I haven't thought too hard on it, but perhaps it won't work if everybody does it. Just like how if 1% of the population in a society are thieves then it kinda makes sense, but if 100% of the population are thieves then it doesn't really make sense. Sorry but I don't really know how to explain it better than that.

The strategy is probably "illegal" because it's a violation of the "keep left unless overtaking" rule, but I've not noticed any serious enforcement of the rule. If you get unlucky, it's unlikely that the police or the courts will take you seriously if you try to claim that you're doing good by describing this strategy to them.

Sometimes though, this strategy can backfire, as it did today on the way back from the bush dance at Bundanoon. Cars A and B were travelling at the same speed in the left hand lane, probably around 105-110 km/h. I was doing 100 km/h in the right hand lane. I had been keeping an eye on them for quite a while in my rear-view mirror, and thought it was a low-change, low-risk situation, so I just waited for them to pass by me (on my left). As Car A came up alongside me, Car B suddenly decided to come into the right-hand lane behind me. I couldn't go into the left hand lane as Car A seemed to be taking forever to pass. Car B flashed me. Finally Car A passed me, and I moved behind him. Car B then passed me on the right. Both cars went ahead some way, and then Car B went back into the left lane, behind Car A! I thought this was pretty bizarre as both of them could have just passed me on the left, and exactly the same situation would have resulted with less stress and annoyance.

Anyway, if you think you're up for the challenge, try it and let us know how you go. I'd be keen to see what others can build upon this.