#edward dutton

Parmi la quinzaine de livres qu'a publié Edward Dutton, 3 sortent nettement du lot pour leurs vues d'autant plus curieuses qu'elles émanent d'un professeur d'université anglais de 46 ans de type Oxbridge, actuellement en poste en Finlande.

Churchill's Headmaster, un livre où la carrière de Churchill est examinée à la lumière de sa personnalité décrite comme sadique, un trait qui expliquerait que cet homme ait poussé sans scrupule pour la guerre à outrance en 14-18 et en 39-45 puis ait fait perdre à son pays tous les territoires de son empire.

Un livre de critique du sunnisme en apparence déjà vu, Why it makes you stupid... but also means you'll conquer the world, mais dont la thèse centrale demande si l'occident doit en apprendre quelque chose s'il veut survivre. L'intelligence individuelle amoindrie au profit de l'intelligence collective (cohésion interne, agressivité externe) alors que l'occident fait exactement le contraire.

A “brain gap” separates Islam and the West. The populations of the Muslim world have markedly lower IQ and produce fewer intellectual and cultural achievements. Muslim communities within Western nations suffer from the same problems. In this startling book, Edward Dutton demonstrates that this phenomenon is not just a matter of race, global conflict, or political systems. It derives from Islam itself.

Sustaining Islamic belief forces people to avoid thinking in analytical and creative ways. Veiling women, circumcising girls, fasting during Ramadan, practicing polygamy, and praying regularly does the same, leading to worse schools, greater poverty, and deficient intellectual development.

But Islam has its advantages, too. Dutton argues that the exact Islamic practices that reduce intelligence also increase ethnocentrism—cooperation with the in-group and violent repulsion of the out-group. And it is the more ethnocentric groups that triumph in the grand struggle that is Darwinian selection. In other words, the ethnocentric shall conquer the Earth. For this reason, Dutton predicts that Islam will come to dominate the West precisely because it reduces intelligence.

Probably many of you have seen this meme about aposematic hair color:

For those not into memes: the idea is that poisonous animals advertise their dangerousness by bright colors to scare away predators. Humans appear to do the same, as those who are poisonous — mentally ill — color their hair in bright dangerous looking colors. Since this meme was made in about 2014, we’ve seen a strong increase in the number of people with unnatural hair colors, in the same time we have seen a rise in mental illness in left-wingers. Coincidence? Probably not right. Zach Goldberg provided me with this example plot, but there’s a lot more evidence.

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However, is it really true though? Is unnatural hair color associated with mental illness, or are we being mislead by a few prominent people with this hair style who appear very mentally ill? We decided to find out using the venerable OKCupid dataset. Here’s the study:

E. Dutton, Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2022). Blue Hair and the Blues: Dying Your Hair Unnatural Colours is Associated with Depression. Psychreg Journal of Psychology.

A number of lines of evidence, such as studies of religious converts and members of conspicuous subcultures, have found a relationship between holding and expressing a strong counter-cultural identity and mental instability. Here we test whether dying your hair an unnatural colour – something which conspicuously expresses non-conformity – is related to mental instability, using a large dataset of online daters (OKCupid dataset, about n=14k used in this study). We find the expected pattern, which was moderate in size (p = -033 to -0.23, depending on controls). This pattern persisted even when controls for age, race, sex, sexual orientation, body type, intelligence, polyamory, vegetarianism, and political beliefs were included.

(Yeah, I don’t know where Dutton found this journal either. It doesn’t even have a DOI, but whatever.)

The model figure summarizes the model results:

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A strength and a weakness of the study is that, obviously, OKCupid being a dating site, our measure of mental illness is not great. Nevertheless, it works. We scored a general factor of mental illness based on the top 5 questions here:

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Despite our measures being relatively modest, the results work out well. There’s no need to p-hacking anything when you study things that are true and strong. If you still think weak measures is a big issue, consider the fact that unreliable measures will in general decrease observed associations, not make them larger. So the fact that we can see correlations/betas of .19 to .33 means that the true association is quite likely much stronger, maybe .50. Additionally, we see relations to known to other constructs we already know mental illness is correlated with, e.g. political leftism (d = .50!) and vegetarianism.