Hardest of all my values but the most valuable - I have to move from explanations to solutions.
From human nature to animal suffering, my life should focus on offering solutions.
I have no idea how to go about finding solutions. I will keep trying until my last breath.
Blind to the obvious, but also we are “blind to our blindness.”
We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.
- Daniel Kahneman
When his book Thinking, Fast, and Slow came out in 2011, I sent Max's holiday card to him. He was the only person I have ever sent Max's card outside of family and friends.
David Brooks wrote that this era we live in will be remembered as "Daniel Kahneman's Era".
Thank you sir for everything you taught me and the world.
In the poem of life Max created, two new beautiful sentences were added yesterday.
Saroo and Blue are brothers who are six years old. Saroo has settled in comfortably in Max's Walden but Blue is acting like Fluffy when she came home six years ago.
Saroo
Steve M Wise few weeks ago. and now Frans de Waal...
Giants who lead torch in reducing pain and suffering of non-human animals have passed away.
The man who brought humans and monkeys together
Frans de Waal died on Thursday evening US time at the age of 75 in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia (USA), as a result of metastatic stomach cancer, his family confirmed.
De Waal was the most famous Dutch primatologist for decades. With his calm speech, great knowledge and undeniable love for our fellow animals, he was also a well-known figure outside of science. Often shown on television, often quoted in debates.
De Waal rose to fame in the 1980s with his book Chimpanzee Politics (1982). This book was based on his observations of the power struggle in the chimpanzee colony of Burgers Zoo in Arnhem. The book offers a radical new view of ape leadership: it is not brute force and the direct application of power, but rather the mediation of conflicts and careful management of alliances that characterize the life of an ape leader. The monkey world suddenly became very human. So humane that conservative Republican Senator Newt Gingrich recommended the book in the 1990s as educational reading for young members of Congress.
This is a common thread in De Waal’s work: apes are much more like humans, and humans are much more like apes, than we think.
As he said in a speech about his work in 2014: “I have moved the monkeys up a little and the people down a little.” …
We have a moral obligation to carry on their work.
Thank you sir.
Frans de Waal has died. Below is a photograpgh of Frans' showing a male chimpanzee inviting another to reconcile after a fight with the invitation accepted a few minutes later. One of my all time favorite images.
The price we pay for being children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the staggering odds of nothingness and eternal night, is the admission of our total cosmic helplessness. We have various coping mechanisms for it — prayer, violence, routine — and still we are powerless to keep the accidents from happening, the losses from lacerating, the galaxies from drifting apart.
Because our locus of choice is so narrow against the immensity of chance, nothing haunts human life more than the consequences of our choices, nothing pains more than the wistful wish to have chosen more wisely and more courageously — the chance untaken, the love unleapt, the unkind word in the time for tenderness. Regret — the fossilized fangs of should have sunk into the living flesh of is, sharp with sorrow, savage with self-blame — may be the supreme suffering of which we are capable. It poisons the entire system of being, for it feeds on the substance we are made of — time, entropic and irretrievable. It tugs at our yearning for, in James Baldwin’s perfect words, “reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error” and stings with the reminder that eventually “one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.”
- Maria Popova on George Saunders
I was consumed by these thoughts all through my teens and twenties. I had no idea what to do nor how to tackle nor why it engulfed my life?
And then Max came. Poof !! all those thoughts were gone while Max taught me to live life in the present with an awareness as humanely as possible.
Plus what else I can ask from life when I had Max in my life? Everything else is just a bonus.
One of the greatest failures of our generation is crime against incarcerated men and women.
There is nothing even remotely close to rehabilitation nor reformation for these people. Loss of complete life while living, disintegration of families, economic cost and worst perpetuating cycle of violence.
I am glad there is some hope with this change. No surprise, this is coming via our fellow sentient beings we share the planet with. This is just hope for incarcerated people but maybe a precursor to who we rewrite our economics and how we work.
Heather wears her dark hair in braids. She’s also wearing a bright red sweater marked DOC for Department of Corrections, identifying her as an inmate of Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women, a minimum security prison located near Belfair, Washington. Heather is not her real name. She says she feels lucky to be participating in this work while she serves her sentence here. She shows me around with a proud, almost parental smile. Along with eight other incarcerated women, Heather is entrusted with the care and feeding of nearly 4,000 members of an endangered species, the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly. With this trust comes the privilege of working just beyond the razor-wire fence during the day before returning to life among the general prison population each night.
[---]
Recognizing the need for urgent action, the Oregon Zoo began a captive breeding program for the species in 2003. In 2011, the zoo helped establish the breeding program at Mission Creek as part of The Evergreen State College and Washington State’s Sustainability in Prisons Project. Since then, the work undertaken by these incarcerated women has become one of the last best hopes for the species’ survival.
On this mid-March morning, the air inside the program’s two greenhouses is warm compared with the shade of the surrounding forest and the adjacent prison yard. Metal racks containing hundreds of identical plastic cups house hungry caterpillars waiting to be fed the leafy green plantain the women grow in a garden outside.
After spending six months in a hibernation-like state known as diapause, the caterpillars roused in late January and have been busy bulking up ever since. After they’re released, they will continue to eat and grow through mid-March to mid-April, after which they’ll pupate beneath dry wood and vegetation and undergo metamorphosis. Their chrysalises, with cream-and-gray bands alternating with orange and black dots, offer a pastel preview of the butterfly to come. Only a few chrysalises have been found in the wild. In April or May, they emerge as adults and take to the air on wings of vivid red or orange and white, outlined in black, calling to mind the brightly hued geometry of stained-glass windows. Their life as butterflies is fleeting—just one to 14 days—but they use that time to mate and lay clusters of approximately 100 bright yellow, quinoa-sized eggs that take on a maroon hue before hatching. A single butterfly can lay up to 1,000 eggs. From those eggs, new caterpillars will appear, fatten up, enter diapause in June or July, and then awaken in January or February to, hopefully, continue the cycle in the wild.
[---]
“When I told my family what I do,” Brooke explains, “they said, ‘we’re so proud of you, that you are doing something that has such a profound mission in the world.’” She finds the work meditative, and despite the “shocking” amount of data she must record, she says the work provides a feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day.
Heather agrees, and admits the job is also on her mind at night. “I literally have dreams about being able to sleep in these greenhouses.”
Over the course of about a week, most of the caterpillars are taken away for release in the wild. For the women who raised them, it’s surprisingly hard to let go.
“I just didn’t think you could form a bond with an insect like that,” Heather declares. “I cried yesterday, saying goodbye.”
Before they leave, she has a message for them: the fate of the species is riding on your shoulders. “You got this,” she says.
I am exhausted hearing people talking and writing about omnipotent and wise Greeks and Romans.
A delusion propagated for centuries that these ancients somehow "plucked" wisdom out of thin air. The reality was very different.
Few years ago, Gladwell wrote a brilliant piece titled "The Tweaker" on Steve Jobs.
Greeks and Romans (as far as we know) were the best tweakers. They were exceptional at assimilating good ideas from other civilizations. In other words, these folks were open-minded, and integrated wisdom from other civilizations.
We need to understand this important and powerful trait and stop teaching "magic".
Review of Josephine Quinn's new book How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History:
This book is written in opposition to “civilisational thinking”, which suggests that there is such a thing as “Western civilisation” existing independently of all others. To Quinn, the concept is not only a manifestation of arrogance on the part of the Westerners who promoted it (especially 19th-century imperialists): it is also a recipe for sterility. Civilisation thrives on cross-pollination.
Quinn’s second big idea is that the notion of “influence”, suggesting that successor cultures are shaped by those that precede them, is misleading. A conventional narrative relates that the collective European mind was formed by the thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, with modifications by Christianity. On the contrary, says Quinn: the past is dead. It is the living who pick and choose the ingredients they will throw into the stew of their own culture. Peoples of the “West” cooked up their material and conceptual world using the wheel from the Central-Asian steppe, poetry from Persia, legal codes from Mesopotamia, mathematics from Babylon and India, Mongolian stirrups, gold from sub-Saharan Africa, maritime skills from the people of the Levant and the far north, and an Asian religion. The founders of “Western civilisation” didn’t limit themselves to any hemisphere, geographically or intellectually, and without their interminglings the mongrel culture we have inherited would have been infinitely poorer and less dynamic.
[---]
She is more interested in trade than in conquest, less impressed by Alexander and Julius Caesar than by the Phoenician sailors who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the sixth century BCE, nearly 2,000 years before the Renaissance explorer Bartolomeu Dias. Readers are likely to seize upon old acquaintances, but she nods only briefly at Achilles and Abraham (whom she describes approvingly as a “travelling man”) and at William the Conqueror. Her project is to remind us that if these names are familiar, it is because the caprices of fate and propaganda have made them so. She prefers to dwell on less celebrated names and societies – not Rome but Etruria; not Sparta but Uruk; not the Egypt of the pharaohs and Cleopatra, but the Garamantes, who built a city that dominated trade across the Sahara for a thousand years, digging tunnels up to five kilometres long to bring water from underground lakes to irrigate their crops.
Her time-scale is immense, and she manages it in quick-quick-slow rhythm. An empire can rise and crumble, four centuries passing, in one sentence. Other times she slows right down to focus on a single encounter. Her geographical reach is equally large. Constantine is in York when he is proclaimed “Augustus” (a term Quinn prefers to “emperor”), and from there he crosses all Europe to establish his capital in the Greek town of Byzantium, on the Roman empire’s easternmost edge.
[---]
Quinn is a professor of ancient history at Oxford, and year after year she reads applications from students saying dutifully that they want to study classics to familiarise themselves with the roots of Western culture. Wrong, she says. This book is a reminder of how much more widely they need to look.
In short, the team discovered that bumblebees can sense a flower’s electrical field, distinguish between fields formed by different floral shapes, and tell whether another bee recently visited a flower.
See, both flowers and bees have electrical fields. As they fly, bees bump into charged particles, such as dust and other small molecules. The friction of these tiny collisions knocks electrons off the bee’s surface, leaving them with a positive charge.
Meanwhile, flowers usually have a negative charge, particularly during mild weather. A plant’s roots in the ground give it a slight negative electric charge. The higher the plant grows, the higher the electric charge it has because the air around the plant also has an electric charge that increases every meter above the ground. This creates a faint electric field around the plant.
Now for the fun part.
One interesting observation is that pollen will hop from the flower to the bee when a positively charged bee approaches the negatively charged flower. Robert told National Geographic:
“We found some videos showing that pollen literally jumps from the flower to the bee, as the bee approaches… even before it has landed.”
Further, the positively charged bees slightly increase the charge of any flower they land on beginning just before landing and lasts for just shy of two minutes — much longer than a bee usually spends visiting a flower. The team demonstrated that when a bee lands on the stem of a petunia, its electrical potential increases by approximately 25 millivolts.
Bees sense this slight change in a flower’s electrical field, which communicates that the flower has recently been visited and is likely low on nectar. It’s sort of like the flower is telling the bee, “I’m out of stock. Check back later.” Meanwhile, when a bee makes contact with a flower, it cancels out the single — which tells other bees, “I’m occupied.”
No one knows for sure how bees actually sense electrical fields. But Robert and others believe the electric fields affect part of a bee, like its antennas or the tiny hairs on its body.
[---]
One of the best things about this knowledge is that you don’t have to travel or book a vacation to see it. From now on, you’ll know the miraculous interaction happens anytime you see a bee and flower interacting. You can watch the interaction and know there is an exchange between these two vastly different species, one we humans can only observe and not experience.
Not only does this knowledge make previous mundane observations more magical, but it’s also a humbling reminder that as brilliant as the human species can be, other animals experience the world wholly differently than we do and are capable of doing things we may never fully understand.
- More Here
Brilliant piece!
Adam Smith's insight of self interest matters most for human beings will be relevant as long as humans evolve into something else.
First, such media has to match the emotional power of authoritarians. Counter-propagandists need their own visceral dramas, YouTubers and the whole spectrum of today’s channels. They don’t need to hide their provenance like Der Chef, though they may have to give people the necessary “cover” to watch safely if in a dangerous dictatorship. But they do need to delve into the operating theatre of our darkest desires. Think of the difference between the cult leader and the therapist. Both dig into people’s unspoken fears and needs. The cult leader, like the authoritarian propagandist, uses that insight to make people dependent on their power. The therapist helps them to become more empowered and self-aware.
Second, we need to be much more attuned to the needs of audiences – think of media less as dispensing information and more as a social service. We are, by the looks of it, going to be in a long struggle with Russia. Now is the time to start investing in media that engage the parts of society that are critical to their war effort: workers in munitions factories or, most obviously, soldiers. It’s much easier than in Delmer’s time to obtain evidence of what they care about. Last month there was, for example, a large leak of documents from Russia’s military that showed how the leadership lies about losses on the front. The aim is not to make these people, who are often involved in war crimes, “good” – it’s to help win the war by getting them to disobey their orders.
Third, such media need to nurture a sense of community, especially in polarised democracies where there is still a chance of displacing malign propaganda before it reaches total dominance, and where there are audiences up for grabs. Instead of experiencing power through a strongman, this community needs to empower people to act for themselves. There are many small initiatives that already pioneer this. Hearken, for example, is an online platform where users can help media choose which topics they should focus on, taking power away from aloof editors and grounding it in local needs. vTaiwan is another platform whose algorithm helps people find solutions to polarising issues by identifying common ground on which to build policies. Such examples are tiny and experimental, and need to be scaled massively.
Sefton Delmer had as many bad lessons for us as good. But the most fundamental one is related to his sense that all social roles are somehow performed. We have a choice. We can either play the role prescribed by propagandists – which makes us dependent on them. Or we can invent media that welcome people into a relationship where they become active players.
You can’t shove “the truth” down people’s throats if they don’t want to hear it, but you can inspire them to have the motivation to care about facts in the first place.
Far from signifying failure, forgetting may be the brain’s frontline strategy in processing incoming information. Forgetting is essential, some researchers now argue, because the biological goal of the brain’s memory apparatus is not preserving information, but rather helping the brain make sound decisions. Understanding how the brain forgets may offer clues to enhancing mental performance in healthy brains while also providing insights into the mechanisms underlying a variety of mental disorders.
[---]
“An overly precise memory is maybe not really what we want in the long term, because it prevents us from using our memories to generalize them to new situations,” she said in San Diego at a recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. “If our memories are too precise and overfitted, then we can’t actually use them to … make predictions about future situations.”
[---]
Getting just the gist is especially helpful in changing environments, where loss of some memories improves decision making in several ways. For one thing, forgetting can eliminate outdated information that would hamper sound judgment. And memories that reproduce the past too faithfully can impair the ability to imagine differing futures, making behavior too inflexible to cope with changing conditions. Failure to forget can result in the persistence of unwanted or debilitating memories, as with post-traumatic stress disorder.
- Why forgetting may make your mind more efficient
Boy! My wish for you is to find that one dog.
Memory does not work like a recording device, preserving everything we have heard, seen, said, and done. Not remembering names or exact dates; having no recollection of the details of a conversation; being unable to recall where you left your glasses or your keys; or watching movies you saw in the past as if you are seeing them for the first time — these are not the symptoms of a failing brain.
They are, on the contrary, signs that your brain is doing just what it was designed to do: prioritize and store important information and let nonessential facts and details slip away, a function that was essential to survival for our evolutionary ancestors. That task has become substantially more difficult with the steady bombardment of email, texts, social media, pop-up ads, and 24-hour news that most people contend with on a daily basis, and as a result, much more extraneous information is forgotten. Even a president might forget a thing or two.
But that doesn’t mean something is wrong. “The problem isn’t your memory, it’s that we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for in the first place,” Ranganath writes in his introduction, a theme that he returns to throughout the book. “Severe memory loss is undoubtedly debilitating, but our most typical complaints and worries around everyday forgetting are largely driven by deeply rooted misconceptions.”
[---]
Far from being static, Ranganath writes, memory, like the brain itself, is malleable, and constantly being updated. It can be shaped by where we are, what we are feeling, what other people say and do, and whether it is a negative or positive memory we are trying to recall. And though people often think about memory as having to do only with the past, Ranganath holds that this is misconceived: Memory also is intimately intertwined with the present and with the future.
“Only when we start to peek behind the veil of the ‘remembering self,’’ he writes, “do we get a glimpse of the pervasive role memory plays in every aspect of human experience and recognize it as a powerful force that can shape everything from our perceptions of reality to the choices and plans we make, to the people we interact with, and even to our identity.”
[---]
Yet Ranganath is the first to admit that what scientists know about memory pales in comparison to what is yet to be learned. “Science is not about having all the answers,” he writes. “It’s about asking better and more revealing questions. There is always going to be a missing piece of the puzzle. But searching for an answer forces us to see the world in new ways, challenging our most stubborn assumptions about who we are.”
- Review of the book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters by Charan Ranganath
His nimbleness of mind allowed him to see threats brewing that dawned too late for many.
- Why Hitch Still Matters: On Christopher Hitchens’s “A Hitch in Time”
And he is one of the few people I know who had immense skin in the game plus was never afraid to say he was wrong.
