In honor of this utterly stupid article from Slate that called evolutionary psychology a pseudo-science, I thought I’d post the two most dangerous fallacies: Naturalistic and Moralistic.

The Naturalistic Fallacy is the tendency to think that because something is, it ought to be. The fallacy is that something being natural or part of human nature doesn’t make it right. The rage you’d get filled with thinking of your partner with someone else might be biologically influenced, but that doesn’t justify acting on it. Human morality doesn’t care if nature “allowed” something, only that it doesn’t approve of that behavior now.

The Moralistic Fallacy is the opposite–it says that since something is wrong, it couldn’t possibly be natural. Often it implies that these things are societal creations and “if we would all get along” they would go away. You might find it really sad that people go to war, but obfuscating the influence doesn’t change anything. People lie, cheat and steal everyday and have benefited from the behavior since the beginning of human history. If morality is to be more than words, it has to understand where the resistance comes from.

The Naturalistic Fallacy is a rationalization and the Moralistic is a delusion–both are stupid. And they both need to be avoided.

If you’ve ever passed a movie shoot, I’m sure you found it as impossible as I have to find out what movie they were actually filming. What is the reason for this? Why all the self-important secrecy? I think this might be another “but we’ve always done it this way.”

To me, this where you create a meaningful relationship between the product and the consumer: “Oh hey, this is the preview for that movie we watched them shoot down the street.” Capturing people’s attention when they are actually interested is a lot easier than when they are trying to do something else. If I were in charge, every truck, every shirt and every camera would have the movie title plastered all over it. But that of course is how Hollywood works–they’d rather pay a half-million dollars for a radio ad than stencil the transportation outside the shoot.

Marketing is about teasing and then reaffirming–hearing people talk and then seeing a lengthy article about it a few months later or seeing a celebrity wearing a logo and then finally identifying it with a brand when you see it in a store. And it is the inability to see things long term–“we need privacy, we can’t have fans bothering us“–that holds people back from doing the little things that add up to a bankable connection.

Over the weekend, I felt stressed and wanted to relax, so I ended up grabbing my skateboard and heading to a parking lot, which I haven’t done since I was like 15. Everything just melted away. The snarl of wheels against concrete like a rottweiler. I really like that edge between messing around and physical activity; you gasp a little for air and your shirt gets hot but you don’t quite sweat. I ended up typing most of this on my Blackberry as I did this–forgetting completely about whatever I had been working on.

What I picked up again quickly was that at a certain point, no matter how hard I would push or the faster I would try to go, I wouldn’t see a different. But if I just toned it down a little, I could ride better. That it is, there was no real correlation between how hard I would push off or how many times I did it and my overall speed. In golf, try to purposely not hit it hard–a half swing often is twice as powerful.

And I think that’s how a lot of things are–the harder you push and struggle and strain the worse you are. A rabbit in a snare grinding the wire down to the bone. We caught this rat as a kid and it chewed itself in half to escape the trap. Needless to say it still died, and not pleasantly. Finesse. Fluidity. Kicking and thrashing–forget what’s more effective, which one feels better?

I have been flipping through the Inner Game of Tennis and he talks about the two selves–the “I am talking to myself” dichotomy. And how the tension between the two is the source of many athletic problems. I sort of realized that this was the same: when I quieted the voice the kept prompting me to push harder, I felt the rattling die off and the speed increase.

I know for me because I am young, the impulse is towards force or passion. But that’s not how things are. All around us there is a natural energy and a flow to things and you can tap into that. You know, the groove, the pocket, the current–all those terms we throw around to describe other people’s freedom of movement but never really bother thinking about for ourselves. Ferriss talks about this–about just letting go and realizing that a little momentum can carry you further than all your frantic scrambling. I am starting to feel that when you stop trying so hard and let your subconscious do what it needs to, you find better results than you do in the Pyrrhic battle for control.