Most people are happier when they have a lot of social contact. But Christopher Ingraham points to a new paper suggesting an exception to this general rule: smart people, true to stereotype, prefer being left alone. But why?

I posed this question to Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness. “The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it … are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective,” she said.

Think of the really smart people you know. They may include a doctor trying to cure cancer or a writer working on the great American novel or a human rights lawyer working to protect the most vulnerable people in society. To the extent that frequent social interaction detracts from the pursuit of these goals, it may negatively affect their overall satisfaction with life.

To put this a little less nicely, average folks don’t really have anything very interesting or enthralling to do with themselves, so getting interrupted by friends represents a net improvement in their daily lives. Smart people do have enthralling—even obsessive—intellectual interests, and social activities take them away from that. So this represents a net loss in happiness.

(Important note for smart, argumentative people reading this: we’re talking about averages here. There are plenty of extroverted smart people and introverted dumb people. But on average, smart people tend to dislike socializing because it takes them away from work they find more rewarding.)

But back to the paper. The authors, Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman Li, have a different theory about all this: the measured difference in social preferences is all due to the way we evolved way back on the savanna. Back then, they say, you had a much better chance of surviving if you had lots of friends, so we naturally evolved to value having lots of friends. Things have changed since then—cell phones, computers, cities, houses, etc.—and even though evolution hasn’t yet had a chance to adapt to a world where social contact isn’t as important, “extremely intelligent” people can use their sheer brainpower to adapt anyway:

“More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionarily novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations,” they write….Smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they’re pursuing some loftier ambition.

This odd thing is that this isn’t really an application of evolutionary psychology, even though the authors are evolutionary psychologists. The hypothesis that humans evolved in hierarchical, medium-sized groups that relied on tight social networks for survival is pretty widely accepted. It’s nothing new. What’s new is the suggestion that smart people can overcome the constraints of cognitive evolution more easily than most people. And that’s not really evolutionary psychology. It’s just regular old psychology, or perhaps regular old neuroscience. It’s pretty likely that this has always been true of smart people, but we just don’t know it. Our social science datasets are shockingly inadequate for dates before 20,000 BCE.

Now, I don’t have access to the paper itself, and it’s possible that the authors address this. The abstract doesn’t give any hint of it, though. For the time being, then, I’ll take this as a fairly banal observation: people with intense intellectual interests value them more highly than social contact, and almost by definition, it’s mostly smart people who have intense intellectual interests. As a refugee from the tech world who dealt with a lot of programmers, and as a blogger who gets annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of writing a post, color me unsurprised.

From Samantha Barbas, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, commenting on the $115 million verdict Hulk Hogan won against Gawker in an invasion-of-privacy case:

For a jury to say that…a celebrity sex tape is not newsworthy, represents a real shift in American free press law.

Ain’t that the truth? It’s hard to believe that a red-blooded American jury concluded that sex tapes aren’t a vital part of our media ecosystem. Maybe our nation really is going down the drain after seven years of Obummer’s leadership.

The last couple of weeks have been pretty hard on Donald Trump, and he’s showing the strain by turning up the insult meter to 11. His favorite quarry, of course, is Megyn Kelly:

• Crazy @megynkelly supposedly had lyin’ Ted Cruz on her show last night. Ted is desperate and his lying is getting worse. Ted can’t win!
• Crazy @megynkelly is now complaining that @oreillyfactor did not defend her against me – yet her bad show is a total hit piece on me. Tough!
• Highly overrated & crazy @megynkelly is always complaining about Trump and yet she devotes her shows to me. Focus on others Megyn!
• Everybody should boycott the @megynkelly show. Never worth watching. Always a hit on Trump! She is sick, & the most overrated person on tv.

Plus there’s been all this in just the past couple of days:

$35M of negative ads against me in Florida…. Stuart Stevens, the failed campaign manager of Mitt Romney’s historic loss…. lyin’ Ted Cruz has lost so much of the evangelical vote…. @WSJ is bad at math….Who should star in a reboot of Liar Liar- Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz?…. Lyin’ Ted Cruz lost all five races on Tuesday.

@EWErickson got fired like a dog from RedState…. millions of dollars of negative and phony ads against me by the establishment…. Club For Growth tried to extort $1,000,000 from me…. Lyin’ Ted Cruz should not be allowed to win [in Utah] – Mormons don’t like LIARS!…. Mitt Romney is a mixed up man who doesn’t have a clue.

I’ll grant that Trump has a point about the Wall Street Journal. Their editorial page really is bad at math. The rest is just a sustained whinefest from a guy who judges everyone in the world by the standard of how sycophantic they are toward Donald Trump. His preoccupation with Megyn Kelly prompted this from the normally mild-mannered Bret Baier:

Enough. @megynkelly is not crazy-she’s not sick. We’ll continue to cover this race fairly. https://t.co/8eKaVTLhd0 https://t.co/hiVJtV0zQN

— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) March 18, 2016

Fox favorite Geraldo Rivera, no shrinking violet, said Trump’s obsession with Kelly “is almost bordering on the unhealthy.” Almost? Fox News itself followed up with a barrage of anti-Trump tweets and this statement on Facebook:

Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land….As the mother of three young children, with a successful law career and the second highest rated show in cable news, it’s especially deplorable for her to be repeatedly abused just for doing her job.

So there you have it. It’s Fox vs. Trump yet again. So far, I don’t think Fox has won any of these street fights, but maybe they’re due. I guess it depends on whether they keep it up, or lamely make amends the way they usually do.

Finally, in other Trump news, this is from an interview he did a couple of days ago. What’s with the mustache?

Today is wildlife watching day. Our squirrel is sitting calmly on our fence snacking on something or other, and the cats are fascinated. They are extremely dedicated to the study of small, local ecologies—with an emphasis on fauna rather than flora.

In non-feline news, I was prepared to link to some baby rhino cuteness, but instead my sister recommends this video of a dog trying to get its human to play fetch. I hate to admit it, but dogs really are smarter than cats. Until they learn to purr, though, cats will always have the edge.

Matt Yglesias aggregates a few Gallup polls today to make the point that, press insistence to the contrary, Americans aren’t especially anti-trade. Nor, apparently, are they especially angry about the economy in general or foreign competition in particular. You can always cherry pick interviews from Trump rallies to make it look like voters are frothing with rage, and editors can then order up a series of thumbsuckers using colorful anecdotes to make the case. The Washington Post, for example, has done this, complete with a nifty slogan (“The Great Unsettling”) and an earnest tagline (“With so much anger in America, a pair of reporters took to the road in search of its causes.”) The fact that America quite plainly isn’t all that angry seems to have made no difference to their headline writers.

Still, some people really are upset about trade deals. The problem is that their arguments always seem pretty thin to me. Here’s Dean Baker a few days ago:

The trade agenda of administrations of both parties has been to quite deliberately put U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low paid workers in the developing world. [But] we have not sought to impose free trade everywhere. We have only done it for less well paid and less educated workers. We have maintained and in some cases strengthened protectionist barriers that sustain the jobs and paychecks of the most highly paid professionals.

Take the case of doctors with an average pay of well over $200,000 a year….We prevent foreign doctors from practicing in the United States unless they completed a U.S. residency program. Does anyone believe that we can’t ensure that doctors going through training programs in Canada, Germany, and other wealthy countries get sufficient skills to competently treat patients in the United States?

There is a similar story for dentists, who get paid almost as much as doctors. They used to be required to get a degree from a dental school in the United States. We just recently started allowing graduates from dental schools in Canada to practice in the United States.

It’s always dangerous arguing with Baker, but this really doesn’t hold water. Cars made overseas are required to meet American standards. You can’t just build anything you want and sell it here. In the case of doctors, the doctor herself is the product, and we require the product to meet American standards. Aside from the minor jolt of hearing a human being called a “product,” there’s not really much difference. You can argue that standards for cars and standards for doctors are poorly designed, but that’s a much subtler case to make. One way or another, both American doctors and American cars are going to be required to meet American standards.

Baker also argues that patent protections favor the rich against foreign competition, and here I have a little more sympathy. But only a little. I’m generally in favor of tightening up patent protections somewhat, but these really are reciprocal requirements: they protect American companies from foreign competition and they also protect foreign companies from American competition. That may work in our favor at the moment, but I wouldn’t count on that being true forever.

No matter how much Donald Trump rails against the TPP being the second-worst agreement ever in the history of mankind (Iran is #1, of course), it’s just not that big a deal. Yeah, the IP stuff is noxious. But how many voters even know what IP stands for, let alone care even a whit about it? The rest of the agreement is a mix of OK and moderately not-OK, and that’s about the strongest emotional reaction I can bring to it. If Congress wants to vote it down, fine. It won’t make much difference. If they vote for it, that’s fine too. It won’t make much difference. It certainly hasn’t ignited smoldering anger among blue-collar workers, and it’s not going to. As far as the election is concerned, it’s a nothingburger.

Kyle Blaine writes today about the news media’s growing uneasiness with the role they’ve played in the rise of Donald Trump. For example, there’s the way they caved in to his campaign’s unprecedented demands about how Trump’s events were to be covered:

After several incidents of Trump campaign aides threatening to revoke credentials for reporters who left the fenced-in press pen, representatives from ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Fox News, and CNN organized a conference call with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to negotiate access.

According to two sources familiar with the call, the Trump campaign, citing security concerns from Secret Service, dictated to the networks that their camera crews can only shoot Trump head-on from a fenced-in press pen….The terms, which limit the access journalists have to supporters and protesters while Trump is speaking, are unprecedented, and are more restrictive than those put on the networks by the White House or Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which has had Secret Service protection for its duration.

Facing the risk of losing their credentialed access to Trump’s events, the networks capitulated….When Trump complains that the media does not “turn the cameras” to show the size of his crowds, it’s because they can’t.

Josh Marshall tweetstormed a couple of days ago that the press is blameless in Trump’s rise. “Yes there’s tons of crappy coverage,” he concluded. “None of it is responsible for Trump’s ascent. That’s due to 1/4 of voting pop deeply drawn to his message.”

I think he’s off base. A quarter of the population has always been drawn to Trumplike messages. That’s the reason folks like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck have such large followings. Trump has done better than them partly because he’s more media savvy—though Palin and Beck are hardly slouches in that department—but also because the press has slobbered over him unlike any candidate in history. They obey his absurd rules forcing them to televise Trump only head on, as if he’s already president. They allow him to call in to their shows constantly, something they don’t do for other candidates. They televise his speeches in their entirety without comment. They respond to every absurd publicity stunt with 24/7 coverage.

And most importantly, they’ve been doing this since the beginning. It’s one thing to say that Trump is the frontrunner now, so of course he gets lots of coverage. But Trump has been getting round-the-clock coverage since Day 1. This was long before anyone thought he was likely to win the nomination. The cable nets were just chasing ratings.

As Marshall says, maybe that’s inevitable: “If there’s a really big story w/huge reader interest, news publications will tend to cover it a lot. Not a wave you can swim against.” But inevitable or not, you simply can’t pretend that it had no effect. Network news operations love to crow about their impact whenever they air some dramatic story that uncovers public corruption, but now they’re pretending that thousands of hours of Trump coverage had no independent effect? Spare me.

I freely acknowledge that it’s hard to pin down Trump when he says ridiculous stuff. But reporters barely even try anymore. They’re apparently afraid that if they truly treat him adversarially, he’ll put them on his enemies list and never talk to them again. Not exactly a profile in courage, is it?

From the LA Times:

A number of horse owners at Thursday’s meeting took exception to comparing cows to horses and demanded a new study.

This is part of the endless soap opera of California’s bullet train. Everyone thinks the train is a great idea as long as it comes nowhere near where they happen to live. Rich communities in the north have already filed environmental lawsuits. Poor communities in the south have demanded that the train tunnel through their neighborhoods. Others want the route changed to protect endangered species in the Angeles National Forest. And equestrians worry that the sound of the train will spook their horses. As the quote above suggests, they were not impressed by European studies suggesting that cows get accustomed to the noise.

And this is all in addition to the endless stream of lawsuits emanating from farmers in the Central Valley who don’t want the train to bisect their property. And from residents of Bakersfield who don’t want the train anywhere near them.

Labor unions, on the other hand, “praised the new plan, saying the project would create badly needed jobs.”

From the Wall Street Journal:

Pro-Democratic groups are launching an orchestrated bid to weaken GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump ahead of a potential November showdown with Hillary Clinton, while her campaign readies a strategy of engaging the billionaire businessman on issues without trading insults.

A coalition of 22 liberal groups—including some that have endorsed Mrs. Clinton and others that back her Democratic rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders—have united behind a campaign to stop Mr. Trump.

Among their plans: anti-Trump demonstrations, possibly including protests at the Republican National Convention this summer in Cleveland, and marches in major cities.

If I can play amateur strategist for a minute, I hope these groups aren’t coordinating too much. It’s nice to see everyone taking the Trump threat seriously, but my sense is that big, coordinated campaigns don’t work very well. They end up adopting strategies that everyone in the group can agree to, and those tend to be a little bland in a lowest-common-denominator sense. For the most part it’s best for everyone to do their own thing. Some of those things will work, some won’t. But at least you don’t have all your eggs in one basket.

Another day, another congressional hearing. Today it was all about the water in Flint, which produced “often-furious questioning” aimed at EPA chief Gina McCarthy and Michigan governor Rick Snyder:

The long-anticipated hearing provided the highest-level jousting yet over a public health disaster that has revealed another partisan divide on Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have called on Snyder to resign, which some committee Democrats also urged Thursday. But Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a longtime critic of the EPA, joined other Republicans in targeting the federal agency during officials’ testimony in the two hearings this week.

Have you ever watched one of these self-righteous displays of mock fury? Of course you have. Did you ever learn anything from them? Of course not. They’re the American version of old-time Soviet show trials, with the victims expected to sit stoically while members of Congress take turns competing to see who can berate them most theatrically for the TV cameras.

But if they want something to be really outraged about, here’s a list of cities, counties, and entire states that have a higher percentage of kids with lead poisoning than Flint ever did after they switched their water supply. These are not crisis levels, either. These are normal, everyday, forever levels:

• Allentown, PA: 23.11%
• Atlantic City, NJ: 10.2%
• Baltimore, MD: 6.7%
• Cleveland, OH: 13.67%
• Detroit, MI: 8.0%
• Erie County, NY: 14.0%
• Grand Rapids, MI: 9.2%
• Illinois: 5.97%
• Louisiana: 4.95%
• Milwaukee County, WI: 10.7%
• New Hampshire: 6.24%
• New York (outside NYC): 6.67%
• Ohio: 5.99%
• Philadelphia, PA: 10.19%
• Pittsburgh, PA: 8.32%
• Richland County, WI: 12.4%
• Salem County, NJ: 8.9%
• Toledo, OH: 5.28%
• West Virginia: 5.28%
• Wisconsin: 5.57%

This is by no means a complete list. I just got tired of typing. And if no place in your state shows up, don’t be too quick to feel smug. Most likely it’s just because your state doesn’t bother to do rigorous testing.

When Gina McCarthy had the gall to explain that EPA has to follow the laws that Congress writes, Jason Chaffetz hammed it up predictably. “You failed!” he screamed at her. Of course, that’s the US Congress she was talking about, the body Chaffetz and the rest of the panel work for. If they actually give a damn about lead poisoning, maybe they should think of doing something about it instead of preening for CSPAN. They’re not in medically induced comas, after all.

I’m a little confused:

• I understand why Donald Trump pulled out of today’s scheduled debate. He figures there’s nothing in it for him. But why did John Kasich pull out? Does he figure he’s so well known by now that he no longer needs free publicity?
• Why can’t Donald Trump find any foreign policy advisors? Sure, as best we can tell his foreign policy is juvenile and erratic, which probably puts off most competent foreign policy hands. But what about the less competent ones? Or the ambitious little gits who just want to hook up with a winner? Why can’t he lure any of those folks into his tent?
• Why doesn’t Merrick Garland figure out a way to quietly leak the notion that he’s opposed to abortion and thinks Roe v. Wade is bad law? He has no track record on abortion, so it would seem perfectly plausible. That would really put Republicans in a tough spot, wouldn’t it?

That’s all for now.