How Animals Bring You Stillness & Peace - A Secret to Stoicism

Vanishing Cancer - Spontaneous Remission Syndrome

I was hoping for this to happen to Max but in hindsight, I made so many mistakes for years which in turn diminished the probability of "Spontaneous Remission".  Everything I do every day for Neo, Fluffy, and Garph is just to improve that probability and in turn, improving the probability of reducing their sufferings during their old age. 

Once again, this is a quintessential characteristic of complex systems; something we don't understand, and after reaching a point of non-equilibrium, spontaneous order (in this case different order) kicks in. 

Dr. Jeffrey Rediger has a gem of a piece on this topic: 

Why does it happen? The standard response in medicine is that we have no idea. And further, we have little interest in finding out. Spontaneous remission is a random stroke of luck — some would say “a miracle.” But overall these cases are considered too random, too rare, to offer us anything of scientific or medical value. We dismiss them as flukes and outliers; we don’t include them in our research. And we certainly don’t talk about them with patients. We don’t want to give people “false hope.”

And yet when I asked my audience at the conference — a roomful of physicians from all over the country — how many of them had ever seen a spontaneous remission in their career, almost every hand went up. I then asked how many of them had written up the incident for the medical literature or otherwise reported it. The hands dropped.

Spontaneous remission isn’t as rare as we thought — we just aren’t talking about it. Nor, I believe, is it random. And the hope it offers is anything but “false.”

I began studying spontaneous remission almost two decades ago at the urging of a friend who told me she was seeing real recoveries at a spiritual healing center. I brushed it off, assuming that any supposed “miracle” healing could be explained in any number of ways — misdiagnosis, wishful thinking, a disease that was going to resolve anyway. But more reports flowed my way, cases with hard evidence of diagnosis and recovery that I could not dismiss. Like the story of Mirae Bunnell.

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Survivors of incurable diseases made radical changes to their lives. They changed the way they ate, focusing on high-nutrient diets free of sugar and processed foods. They leaned into daily habits and exercise routines that made them feel good. They ditched careers or relationships that were limiting or toxic. They addressed their stress response, ending the damaging cycle of chronic fight-or-flight that keeps our bodies awash in corrosive stress hormones. When faced with a terminal diagnosis — an “end date” — they asked themselves the question: what do I want to do with the time I have left? And then they did it. Finally, they examined their own deep-seated beliefs about who they were — a process I can only describe as “healing your identity.”

What does that mean — to heal your identity?

It means that you need to see and focus on what is right and good about you. You need to actively eliminate false, negative beliefs about yourself that leave you questioning your value. One of the most common things that people have said to me over the years is that it took an illness for them to wake up and realize that they needed to stop taking care of others or responding to the perceived expectations of others instead of also doing what it takes to create life and well-being within them.

What makes you come alive? What gives you a life worth living? As my friend Gabor Mate, physician and trauma expert, says: If you don’t know how to say no, your body will eventually say no for you. It might feel selfish at first, but it’s not. If you make the hard choices to create a life that puts a light in your eyes and creates authentic well-being within you, you will absolutely change your relationship with others and your relationship with yourself. When that occurs, it is sometimes astonishing what becomes possible in a mind and body.

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Of course, there is still much we don’t know about spontaneous remission. But what we don’t know shouldn’t hold us back from acting on what we do know.

Mirae Bunnell sends a thank-you note to her doctors every year on Thanksgiving — the anniversary of the day that the pathology report came back telling them she was cancer-free. Her doctors are delighted to receive her cards. They pin them up on the office wall, saying, “We never get thank you notes!”

When Mirae repeated this at a family gathering, her brother-in-law pointed something out. “That’s because nobody lives,” he said.

But Mirae did. And so have many others who are coming forward now to tell their stories. If we want to open up new avenues to health and healing, it’s imperative that we listen.

I wish... Max's story was very similar to Mirae's story. But yet, I am so grateful that I got more time with him than it seemed when he was first diagnosed. 

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Collective Action and Rational Choice: Place, Community, and the Limits to Individual Self-Interest

Abstract

Despite geographers' increasing concern with place-based politics, the effects of place-based social relations on collective political action remain largely untheorized. By emphasizing the free rider problem--why a rational, self-interested individual would engage in collective action when his/her impact is negligible and the benefits of collective action are public and free--rational choice theory correctly problematizes collective action. Its reliance on the essentialist homo economicus model of human nature, however, often leads to untenable solutions that do not consider nonstrategic forms of rationality, collective identity formation, and the crucial effects of place-specific social relations. Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action, in contrast, provides a broader conception of rationality that recognizes communicative as well as strategic and instrumental forms of rationality and focuses on social interaction rather than on isolated individuals. Individuals reach common understandings, form communal bonds, and construct collective identities through communicative action. The relative importance of communicative versus strategic forms of action coordination varies geographically and historically and cannot be understood apart from systemic processes. As communicative forms of action coordination (based on communicative rationality) are "colonized" by systemic forms of action coordination (based on strategic and instrumental rationality) and destabilized by capital hypermobility, communal bonds break down. Places become less significant as bases for community and more significant in corporate location and investment decisions. These processes, however, engender resistance. Strong place-based communities mobilize when threatened and new forms of collective identity arise through channels created by time-space compression.

- Full paper here

It is no surprise that Toxic Individualism is Taking Over Our Culture:

This problem used to be a pain. Now it’s turning into a problem that dominates our society. We’ve got a bunch of spoiled children who want to take-take-take without giving anything back.

It’s the definition of entitlement, and it’s wrecking everything. This week we’re talking about Texas, but what’s going on now happens in deep red states all over the country. I happen to live in one. Let me tell you, it gets truly depressing to realize how alone you are. Even if you don’t have a mayor who flips you the mental bird-like Tim Boyd does, you know it’s what they’re thinking. They don’t want to help you, not really.

That’s why people like me take survival prep seriously. We know there’s a 50 percent chance we could get stuck in the exact same situation Texans are now. So we’ve got our gear handy.

Every day, you remind yourself that you’ll probably run across five or six jerks who truly don’t give a shit about you. Trying to point out contradictions in their thought process doesn’t work. It just makes them angry, and even less likely to change their minds.

You learn to spot them from a distance, and avoid them.

It’s the only way.

How To Relax, Sleep & Live!

 

We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behavior of the young in mature life, there are others which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces—“the joy of life,” and a desire to communicate in some way or another with other individuals of the same or of other species—in short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive feature of all the animal world.

To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.” If so, and if Kropotkin was right, then glimmers of freedom, or even of moral life, begin to appear everywhere around us.

- What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?

 

stoicism ≠ Stoicism

Lowercase “stoicism” is often equated with the way of coping with stress that people call “having a stiff upper-lip”. More specifically, it means suppressing or concealing unpleasant, painful, or embarrassing emotions. The problem with that is that there’s now a substantial body of scientific research from different teams of psychologists around the world, working with different populations, which tends to converge on the finding that stoicism is unhealthy. In fact to highlight that — and because it’s pretty awkward to distinguish between “Stoicism” and “stoicism” when speaking rather than writing — I sometimes just refer to lowercase “stoicism” as pseudo-stoicism. Many people assume that lowercase stoicism is synonymous with emotional resilience or toughness. Ironically, though, research tends to show the opposite. It doesn’t lead to resilience but often increases emotional vulnerability and it would better be described as a form of weakness rather than strength.

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Pseudo-stoicism is based on a very crude and simplistic view of how our emotions work. It’s basically both false and unworkable. The ancient Stoics, by contrast, had a much more nuanced conception of the psychology of emotion. That’s how they were able to develop an effective system of psychotherapy and emotional resilience-building. They were actually well over two thousand years ahead of their time in anticipating modern cognitive-behavioural therapy.

We call the naive psychological assumptions made by people in ordinary language their “folk psychology”. The folk psychology of emotions is remarkably simplistic. People tend to talk about feelings such as anxiety as if they were homogenous. Psychologists sometimes call this the “lump” theory of anxiety, for example. Anxiety is talked about as if it’s just a blob of unpleasantness and somehow we have to struggle to contain or suppress it. That’s such a crude concept, though, that it’s almost superstitious. In reality, there are many different types of anxiety, which function in different ways. Snake-phobic anxiety is not at all the same as a clinical panic attack or generalized anxiety, in psychopathology. They have different causes, symptoms, prognoses, and respond to different treatments.

Moreover, emotions such as anxiety are composite. They’re made up of lots of different elements, such as thoughts, actions, and feelings, of different kinds, which interact with one another. Anxiety, I like to say, is a cake baked from many ingredients — it’s not just a homogenous lump. The more we understand the ingredients of our emotions the more easily we can process and control them, in healthy and natural ways. Perhaps the most fundamental and important distinction is the favourite one of the Stoics — some things are up to us and other things are not.

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The Stoics were far ahead of their time in proposing that emotions are cognitive in nature — they consist not only of feelings but also of thoughts and beliefs. When you get angry, for example, it’s because you are having angry thoughts and your mind has activated underlying angry beliefs and attitudes.

People who use pseudo-stoicism as a coping strategy don’t distinguish between the “lump” of emotion and the cognitive aspects, though. They just try to shove all of their emotions down, forcing them out of their minds. Alternatively, they use alcohol, drugs, or distractions such as comfort eating or compulsive checking social media to try to escape their emotions by numbing themselves. The word “stoic” is therefore often just used as a synonym for “unemotional” and that’s definitely not what Stoicism teaches. The ancient Stoics repeatedly emphasized that their ideal was not to be like statues or men with hearts of stone.

Rather than trying to suppress feelings or sensations, which would entail judging an indifferent to be bad or harmful, the Stoics tried to modify the underlying value judgement. That approach happens to be more in accord with the way modern cognitive therapists bring about emotional change and it’s very different from what people mean by “keeping a stiff upper lip”. For instance, the Stoics believed that fear is based on the underlying belief that something bad, something awful, is about to happen. That’s virtually identical to modern cognitive models of anxiety. If someone has an irrational fear it’s typically the case that they’ve overestimated the probability and/or severity of the anticipated threat.

- More Here

High vs. Low Context Comunication

The American anthropologist Edward T Hall introduced a distinction between two types of communication culture: high context and low context. In a low-context culture, communication is explicit and direct. What people say is taken to be an expression of their thoughts and feelings. You don’t need to understand the context – who is speaking, in what situation – to understand the message. A high-context culture is one in which little is said explicitly, and most of the message is implied. The meaning of each message resides not so much in the words themselves, as in the context. Communication is oblique, subtle, ambiguous.

Most of us, wherever we are in the world, are living increasingly low-context lives, as more and more of us flock to cities, do business with strangers and converse over smartphones. Different countries still have different communication cultures, but nearly all of them are subject to the same global vectors of commerce, urbanisation and technology – forces that dissolve tradition, flatten hierarchy and increase the scope for confrontation. It’s not at all clear that we are prepared for this.

For most of our existence as a species, humans have operated in high-context mode. Our ancestors lived in settlements and tribes with shared traditions and settled chains of command. Now, we frequently encounter others with values and customs different to our own. At the same time, we are more temperamentally egalitarian than ever. Everywhere you look, there are interactions in which all parties have or demand an equal voice. Everyone expects their opinion to be heard and, increasingly, it can be. In this raucous, irreverent, gloriously diverse world, previously implicit rules about what can and cannot be said are looser and more fluid, sometimes even disappearing. With less context to guide our decisions, the number of things on which “we all agree” is shrinking fast.

Think about what defines low-context culture, at least in its extreme form: endless chatter, frequent argument; everyone telling you what they think, all the time. Remind you of anything? As Ian Macduff, an expert in conflict resolution, puts it, “the world of the internet looks predominantly like a low-context world”.

If humans were purely rational entities, we would listen politely to an opposing view before offering a considered response. In reality, disagreement floods our brain with chemical signals that make it hard to focus on the issue at hand. The signals tell us that this is an attack on me. “I disagree with you” becomes “I don’t like you”. Instead of opening our minds to the other’s point of view, we focus on defending ourselves.

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It’s often said that if humanity is to rise to the existential threats it faces, we must put our differences aside. But when we all agree – or pretend to – it becomes harder to make progress. Disagreement is a way of thinking, perhaps the best one we have, critical to the health of any shared enterprise, from marriage to business to democracy. We can use it to turn vague notions into actionable ideas, blind spots into insights, distrust into empathy. Instead of putting our differences aside, we need to put them to work.

To do so, we will have to overcome a widespread discomfort with disagreement. Disagreeing well is hard, and for most of us, stressful. But perhaps if we learn to see it as a skill in its own right, rather than as something that comes naturally, we might become more at ease with it. I believe we have a lot to learn from those who manage adversarial, conflict-ridden situations for a living; people whose job it is to wring information, insight and human connection out of even the most hostile encounter.

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The US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has described how to have a conversation with someone with whom you strongly disagree. You don’t have to share her politics to see that it is good advice:

“I have this mentor. And one of the best pieces of advice that he gave me is ‘always give someone the golden gate of retreat’, which is: give someone enough compassion, enough opportunity in a conversation for them to look good changing their mind. And it’s a really important thing to be able to do, because if you’re just like, ‘Oh you said this thing! You’re racist!’, you’re forcing that person to say, ‘No I’m not’. Et cetera. There’s no golden gate of retreat there. The only retreat there is to just barrel right through the opposing opinion.”

When we’re in an argument with someone, we should be thinking about how they can change their mind and look good – maintain or even enhance their face – at the same time. Often this is very hard to do in the moment of the dispute itself, when opinion and face are bound even more tightly together than they are before or after (the writer Rachel Cusk defines an argument as “an emergency of self-definition”). However, by showing that we have listened to and respected our interlocutor’s point of view, we make it more likely that they will come around at some later point. If and when they do, we should avoid scolding them for not agreeing with us all along. It’s amazing quite how often people in polarised debates do this; it hardly makes it more tempting to switch sides. Instead, we should remember that they have achieved something we have not: a change of mind.

- Adapted from Conflicted: Why Arguments Are Tearing Us Apart and How They Can Bring Us Together by Ian Leslie

John McCarthy's Novel Teaches Us To...

The Road is one of my all-time favorite books. If you want to understand "why", please read this older post: 

Son: We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?

Father: No. Of course not.

Even if we were starving?

We’re starving now.

No matter what.

No. No matter what.

Because we’re the good guys.

Yes.

And we’re carrying the fire.

And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.

McCarthy has said that The Road is everything he wants to teach his son about growing up, about life, about being “a good guy.”

The father continually tells his son, that no matter what, “You must carry the fire.”

Yes, the fire is literal–the boy needs the fire for warmth and to cook but fire is metaphorical for compassion and love.

Because, the father believes it’s the fire that will spring the boy’s survival.

Daily Stoic has a beautiful piece on the same:

Everything depended on reaching the coast, yet waking in the night he knew that all of this was empty and no substance to it.” The coast was just an idea, a distant point on the horizon, that served as something to measure progress against. No more, no less. So the man kept going. He pushed his cart, he protected his son, he carried the fire. He tried to do what was right, tried not to be broken down by all that was happening around him, tried not to be corrupted by it.

All we can do is keep going. We keep buggering on, as Churchill did. We fight on. We stick to it. We endure. We survive. Maybe things will get better soon, maybe they won’t. But we’ll definitely keep moving. We’ll carry the fire. We’ll do what’s right. We won’t be broken down.

 

A Gift 13 Years In Making, Came To Light 13 Months After Max

Cobb: Imagine you're designing a building. You consciously create each aspect. But sometimes it feels like it's almost "creating itself", if you know what I mean.

Ariadne: Yeah, like I'm discovering it.

Cobb: Genuine inspiration, right? Now, in a dream, our mind continuously does this. We create and perceive our world simultaneously, and our mind does this so well that we don't even know it's happening. That allows us to get right in the middle of that process.

In the movie Inception, Leonardo would be peacefully sitting outside a cafe while the buildings and everything around him collapses. The dream collapses. Nevertheless, he remains serene. 

13 plus years with Max and the last 18 months of those years with cancer had inevitably forced me to face obstacle after obstacle with every minute and day focusing only on giving him more time. Everything happening around me was subconsciously tuned out. Nothing mattered other than time with him and getting him well. 

Those minutes and days for 18 months had changed me. Now, last week I realized it had become a habit. I am able to focus on signals in an ocean of noise. 

Having lived through Max's pain and having lost Max, no obstacle seemed important nor sisyphean. I realize now that Max had gifted me his serenity and the power of going zero to 100 within moments' notice to focus peacefully on anything and anywhere under any dire circumstances. 

Crazy as it sounds, I able to see that in myself now as a spectator from my past self. I have lived through my dreams collapse in front of my eyes and there was nothing I could at that time. But Max made sure even the ruins of the collapsed dreams don't ruin me and instead he transformed me to be a little better living being who can now focus better on what matters. 

I'm going to improvise. Listen, there's something you should know about me... about inception. An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.

Serendipity Mindset & Luck

But there’s another force, constantly at play in life, that often makes the greatest difference to our futures: the ‘unexpected’ or the ‘unforeseen’. If you think about it, you already look out for the unexpected every day, but perhaps only as a defence mechanism. For example, whenever you use a pedestrian crossing on a busy road, you look out for the unexpected driver who might race through the red light. That ‘alertness’ to, or awareness of, the unexpected is at the centre of understanding the science of (smart) luck and exploiting it to your benefit.

In my research into what makes individuals and organisations fit for the future, one insight has come up again and again: many of the world’s leading minds have developed a capacity, often unconscious, to turn the unexpected into positive outcomes. Developing this ‘serendipity mindset’, as I call it, is both a philosophy of life and a capability that you can shape and nurture in yourself.

You might think of serendipity as passive luck that just happens to you, when actually it’s an active process of spotting and connecting the dots. It is about seeing bridges where others see gaps, and then taking initiative and action(s) to create smart luck. Serendipity is a guiding force in great scientific discoveries but it’s also present in our everyday lives, in the smallest of moments as well as the greatest life-changing events. It’s how we often ‘unexpectedly’ find love, a co-founder, a new job, or a business partner – and it’s how inventions such as Post-it Notes, X-rays, penicillin, microwaves and many other innovations came about.

My research suggests that serendipity has three core characteristics. 

• It starts with a serendipity trigger – the moment when you encounter something unusual or unexpected. 
• Next, you need to connect the dots – that is, observe the trigger and link it to something seemingly unrelated, thus realising the potential value within the chance event (sometimes referred to as a Eureka moment). 
• Finally, sagacity and tenacity are required to follow through and create an unexpected positive outcome. While a particular chance encounter is an event, serendipity is a multifaceted process, as the figure below shows (note that the trigger and connecting the dots often happen at the same time).

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To be lucky, it’s often essential to be open and alert to the unexpected.

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Although being alert to the unexpected is vital for creating smart luck, there is another key factor: preparation. This is partly about removing the barriers to serendipity, both mental (your mindset) and physical (the spaces you live and interact in), such as: overloaded schedules; senseless meetings; and the inefficiencies throughout your day that rob you of time, curiosity and a sense of joy. You can prepare by strengthening your mental readiness to connect with opportunity, and creating an environment that enables the use of your skills and available resources to act on the moment. An unprepared mind often discards unusual encounters, thereby missing the opportunities for smart luck. But this is a learned behaviour. Preparation is about developing the capacity to accelerate and harness the positive coincidences that show up in life. 

- More Here from Dr. Christian Busch author of The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck

Upside Of Depression

Two brilliant papers on the upside of depression. The idea here is not to fall under the trap of societal bias against depression nor passively accept that depression is good but to accept and act on how to use it to make oneself learn and develop from what we rumiate. 

The bright side of being blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems:

Abstract

Depression ranks as the primary emotional problem for which help is sought. Depressed people often have severe, complex problems, and rumination is a common feature. Depressed people often believe that their ruminations give them insight into their problems, but clinicians often view depressive rumination as pathological because it is difficult to disrupt and interferes with the ability to concentrate on other things. Abundant evidence indicates that depressive rumination involves the analysis of episode-related problems. Because analysis is time consuming and requires sustained processing, disruption would interfere with problem-solving. The analytical rumination (AR) hypothesis proposes that depression is an adaptation that evolved as a response to complex problems and whose function is to minimize disruption of rumination and sustain analysis of complex problems. It accomplishes this by giving episode-related problems priority access to limited processing resources, by reducing the desire to engage in distracting activities (anhedonia), and by producing psychomotor changes that reduce exposure to distracting stimuli. Because processing resources are limited, the inability to concentrate on other things is a tradeoff that must be made to sustain analysis of the triggering problem. The AR hypothesis is supported by evidence from many levels, including genes, neurotransmitters and their receptors, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, neuroenergetics, pharmacology, cognition and behavior, and the efficacy of treatments. In addition, we address and provide explanations for puzzling findings in the cognitive and behavioral genetics literatures on depression. In the process, we challenge the belief that serotonin transmission is low in depression. Finally, we discuss implications of the hypothesis for understanding and treating depression.

The evolutionary significance of depression in Pathogen Host Defense:

Abstract

Given the manifold ways that depression impairs Darwinian fitness, the persistence in the human genome of risk alleles for the disorder remains a much debated mystery. Evolutionary theories that view depressive symptoms as adaptive fail to provide parsimonious explanations for why even mild depressive symptoms impair fitness-relevant social functioning, whereas theories that suggest that depression is maladaptive fail to account for the high prevalence of depression risk alleles in human populations. These limitations warrant novel explanations for the origin and persistence of depression risk alleles. Accordingly, studies on risk alleles for depression were identified using PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE to examine data supporting the hypothesis that risk alleles for depression originated and have been retained in the human genome because these alleles promote pathogen host defense, which includes an integrated suite of immunological and behavioral responses to infection. Depression risk alleles identified by both candidate gene and genome-wide association study (GWAS) methodologies were found to be regularly associated with immune responses to infection that were likely to enhance survival in the ancestral environment. Moreover, data support the role of specific depressive symptoms in pathogen host defense including hyperthermia, reduced bodily iron stores, conservation/withdrawal behavior, hypervigilance and anorexia. By shifting the adaptive context of depression risk alleles from relations with conspecifics to relations with the microbial world, the Pathogen Host Defense (PATHOS-D) hypothesis provides a novel explanation for how depression can be nonadaptive in the social realm, whereas its risk alleles are nonetheless represented at prevalence rates that bespeak an adaptive function.

 

I am Dumb. Thank You Adam Grant!

Mental horsepower doesn’t guarantee mental dexterity. No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again. Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs. One study investigated whether being a math whiz makes you better at analyzing data. The answer is yes—if you’re told the data are about something bland, like a treatment for skin rashes. But what if the exact same data are labeled as focusing on an ideological issue that activates strong emotions—like gun laws in the United States? 

Being a quant jock makes you more accurate in interpreting the results—as long as they support your beliefs. Yet if the empirical pattern clashes with your ideology, math prowess is no longer an asset; it actually becomes a liability. The better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views. If they were liberals, math geniuses did worse than their peers at evaluating evidence that gun bans failed. If they were conservatives, they did worse at assessing evidence that gun bans worked. In psychology, there are at least two biases that drive this pattern. One is confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias: seeing what we want to see. These biases don’t just prevent us from applying our intelligence. They can actually contort our intelligence into a weapon against the truth. We find reasons to preach our faith more deeply, prosecute our case more passionately…

- Adam Grant in his book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

Changing minds is utterly underrated while love is utterly overrated. Anyone can unleash subjective bullshit in the name of love. Changing minds requires a constant Bayesian update to one's belief, seeing reality as it is, lifelong search for truth, and living one's life with Buddha's quintessential eightfold path: 

1. Right understanding: Understanding that the Four Noble Truths are noble and true.
2. Right thought: Determining and resolving to practice Buddhist faith.
3. Right speech: Avoiding slander, gossip, lying, and all forms of untrue and abusive speech.
4. Right conduct: Adhering to the idea of nonviolence (ahimsa), as well as refraining from any form of stealing or sexual impropriety.
5. Right means of making a living: Not slaughtering animals or working at jobs that force you to violate others.
6. Right mental attitude or effort: Avoiding negative thoughts and emotions, such as anger and jealousy.
7. Right mindfulness: Having a clear sense of one’s mental state and bodily health and feelings.
8. Right concentration: Using meditation to reach the highest level of enlightenment.

 

Surprises I Live & Die For ... Catholic Theologians Support Happy's Case

Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated, and seen through by the passion of individuals.

- Margaret Mead

Those passionate individuals and those unknown faces come every corner of the world. They help maintain the thin line between civilization and barbarism. They live and die to reduce immense suffering in the world. And I continue to live because of them and help them in any way I can. 

This time, those passionate individuals are these handfuls of Catholic theologians who are supporting Happy's case in NYC court. You can read about the case to free Happy, an Elephant from Bronx zoo after 49 years of captivity.  

Most Sapiens cannot sit at home quietly even in the midst of a pandemic but they don't even care nor connect nor understand Happy's sufferings who have been in captivity her entire life. Yes, I do get angry while encountering these self-centered Sapiens. 

Our central argument as Catholic theologians is that Happy is not a thing for us to confine, use, and put on display in a zoo (even in an attempt to produce a good outcome), but rather a particular kind of creature who God made to flourish in a particular way—a way some academics refer to as a telos. 

As we explain below, we believe Happy cannot flourish as this kind of creature while captive in the Bronx Zoo and that she would be significantly better able become the kind of creature God made her to be in a sanctuary. Nearly all theologians now agree that the Biblical dominion God has given human beings over creation is not a license to use and dominate, but rather a command to be caretakers and stewards. 

Nonhuman animals like Happy have been created to fit into a particular place within the order of God’s creation, an order which human beings are bound to respect. Non-human animals belong to God, not to us. They are God’s creatures, not ours.

- Read the entire petition by these passionate Catholic theologians here

Microbiome & COVID

No surprise here! 

Last this Karl Friston used the phrase "Immunological Dark Matter" - as a humble euphemism for stuff we don't know about our immunity (an explanation for Germany's less infection rate). 

A healthy microbiome falls under one of many factors contributing to that immunological dark matter (and important to understand is NOT the only one but one of the many). 

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which has been declared a pandemic, has exhibited a wide range of severity worldwide. Although this global variation is largely affected by socio-medical situations in each country, there is also high individual-level variation attributable to elderliness and certain underlying medical conditions, including high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. As both elderliness and the aforementioned chronic conditions are often associated with an altered gut microbiota, resulting in disrupted gut barrier integrity, and gut symptoms have consistently been associated with more severe illness in COVID-19 patients, it is possible that dysfunction of the gut as a whole influences COVID-19 severity. This article summarizes the accumulating evidence that supports the hypothesis that an altered gut microbiota and its associated leaky gut may contribute to the onset of gastrointestinal symptoms and occasionally to additional multiorgan complications that may lead to severe illness by allowing leakage of the causative coronavirus into the circulatory system.

- Full paper by Heenam Stanley Kim here