The Discontinuous Mind

How many of us lie below the stupidity line? How many runners exceed the fast line? How many Oxford undergraduates lie above the first-class line? Yes, we in universities do it too. Examination performance, like most measures of human ability or achievement, is a continuous variable whose frequency distribution is bell-shaped. Yet British universities insist on publishing a class list, in which a minority of students receive first-class degrees, rather a lot obtain seconds (nowadays subdivided into upper and lower seconds), and a few get thirds. That might make sense if the distribution had several peaks with more-or-less shallow valleys in between, but it doesn’t. Anybody who has ever marked an exam knows that the distribution is unimodal. And the bottom of one class is separated from the top of the class below by a small fraction of the distance that separates it from the top of its own class. This fact alone points to a deep unfairness in the system of discontinuous classification.

These examples illustrate the ubiquity of what I am calling the discontinuous mind. It can probably be traced to the ‘essentialism’ of Plato – one of the more pernicious ideas in all history. At what precise moment during development does an embryo become a ‘person’? Only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such a question. An embryo develops gradually from single-celled zygote to newborn baby, and there’s no instant when ‘personhood’ should be deemed to have burst on the scene. The world is divided into those who get this truth, and those who wail: ‘But there has to be some moment when the fetus becomes human. Doesn’t there?’ No, there really doesn’t, any more than there has to be a day when a middle-aged person becomes old. The discontinuous mind can lead people to describe abortion as murder, even when the embryo has no more brain than a worm. And they may therefore feel righteously justified in committing real murder against a doctor – a thinking, feeling, sentient adult, with a loving family to mourn her.

Paleontologists may argue passionately about whether a particular fossil is, say, Australopithecus or Homo. But, given that the second evolved gradually from the first, there must have existed individuals who were intermediate. It is essentialist folly to insist on shoehorning your fossil into one genus or the other. There never was an Australopithecus mother who gave birth to a Homo child. Quarrelling fiercely about whether a fossil is ‘really’ Australopithecus or Homo is like having a heated argument over whether George is ‘tall’. He’s five foot ten, doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know?

Every creature who ever lived belonged to the same species as its mother. If a time machine could serve up your 200 million greats-grandfather, you would eat him with sauce tartare and a slice of lemon. He was a fish. Yet you are connected to him by an unbroken line of intermediate ancestors, every one of whom belonged to the same species as its parents and its children. ‘I’ve danced with a man who’s danced with a girl who’s danced with the Prince of Wales,’ as the song goes. I could mate with a woman, who could mate with a man, who could mate with a woman who . . . after a sufficient number of steps . . . could mate with an ancestral fish, and produce fertile offspring. It is only the discontinuous mind that insists on drawing a line between a species and the ancestral species that birthed it. Evolutionary change is gradual: there never was a line between any species and its evolutionary precursor.

- Richard Dawkins

Meta Values - 39

Truth comes from reality. Nothing more is certain than reality and hence, death is part of reality. 

Truth can never be digested if served on a platter. 

One has to rise above or go below or go multi dimensions to seek truth.  It is a quest and a noble one. 

It is no surprise that sapiens then and now reject truth and seek fiction. 

Max in me will seek until my last breath. 

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. 

- Voltaire

 

Meta Values - 38

Meta Values - 9 - - There shouldn't be confusion about courage. 

Men and women who perceive the world as us vs them and have nothing better to do than fight has nothing to with courage. 

Their boredom and need to perpetually fight sometimes masquerade into patriotism,  or other bullshit. 

These men and women cannot tolerate being in peaceful moments and leave alone a peaceful world.  

Standing up for truth needs courage. Violence and fighting are just one part of courage.

Courage means changing one's mind. Courage means civil disobedience to tackle wrongs.  Courage means being silent when time calls and not making things worse. Courage means patience. Courage has multitudes of faces. 

Courage means working for a peaceful world knowing I wouldn't be around to see that change. 

Theories To Old Truth - Roots of Cancer

Strictly speaking, genetics do not play a known role in human cancer,” says Carlos Sonnenschein, MD, a professor of integrative physiology and immunology at Tufts University School of Medicine. “Most, if not all, cancers are due to environmental factors.

Those factors, Sonnenschein explained by email, include things we have some control over and things we don’t, from what we eat and drink to whether we smoke, where and how we live, how much physical activity we get, plus societal factors such as pollution and exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals found in pesticides, plastics and processed foods.

- More here and I told you so. 

I lost Max because of this. 

Humans never take responsibility for their actions. Some "magic" caused x and some "magic" y will fix x while I sip my beer, play golf, and go for vacation in sunny weather (hey I work hard you know). 

For the past few years since Max left me, I don't feel any emotions for someone who is willfully ignorant and gets a deadly disease. I just say, sorry to hear and they are out of my mind.

On the other hand, I will do everything I can for someone who regrets their choices they made, and they are paying the price. I am yet to meet one in person.

Cat Owners Asked To Share Pets’ Quirks For Genetic Study

Cat owners are being asked share their pet’s quirky traits and even post researchers their fur in an effort to shed light on how cats’ health and behaviour are influenced by their genetics.

The scientists behind the project, Darwin’s Cats, are hoping to enrol 100,000 felines, from pedigrees to moggies, with the DNA of 5,000 cats expected to be sequenced in the next year.

The team say the goal is to produce the world’s largest feline genetic database.

“Unlike most existing databases, which tend to focus on specific breeds or veterinary applications, Darwin’s Cats is building a diverse, large-scale dataset that includes pet cats, strays and mixed breeds from all walks of life,” said Dr Elinor Karlsson, the chief scientist at the US nonprofit organisation Darwin’s Ark, director of the vertebrate genomics group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and associate professor at the UMass Chan medical school.

“It’s important to note, this is an open data project, so we will share the data with other scientists as the dataset grows,” she added.

The project follows on the heels of Darwin’s Dogs, a similar endeavour that has shed light on aspects of canine behaviour, disease and the genetic origins of modern breeds.

Darwin’s Cats was launched in mid-2024 and already has more than 3,000 cats enrolled, although not all have submitted fur samples.

Participants from all parts of the world are asked to complete a number of free surveys about their pet’s physical traits, behaviour, environment, and health.

However, at present, DNA kits – for owners to submit fur samples – can be sent only to US residents, and a donation of $150 (£120) for one cat is requested to cover the cost of sequencing and help fund the research.

Karlsson added the team had developed a method to obtain high-quality DNA from loose fur without needing its roots – meaning samples can simply be collected by brushing.

The researchers hope that by combining insights from cats’ DNA with the survey results they can shed light on how feline genetics influences what cats look like, how they act and the diseases they experience.

“Understanding the genetics behind personality traits could even shed light on human neurodevelopmental conditions,” said Karlsson.

The team also hopes to learn more about the genetic diversity of different breeds and unpick the ancestry of modern cats, with Karlsson adding she is particularly interested in many-toed cats.

- More Here

We Like Royality & We Don't Know It

And hence, I not only have theoretical immense gratitude for what I have but I thank every day, every moment for this uttermost comfortable life we all have. 

Most importantly, I act mindfully for this gift of riches I am endowed with and I don't have any wants nor desires in life. 

Wants are road to hell when I and most of the human kind have their needs fulfilled.

We live like royality and we don't know it (and read the entire series on How system works): 

But when I mentioned how remarkable it was that a hundred-plus people could parachute into a remote, unfamiliar place and eat a gourmet meal untroubled by fears for their health and comfort, they were surprised. The heroic systems required to bring all the elements of their dinner to these tables by the sea were invisible to them. Despite their fine education, they knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.

This is not a statement about Kids These Days so much as about Most People These Days. Too many of us know next to nothing about the systems that undergird our lives. Which is what put me in mind of Thomas Jefferson and his ink.

Jefferson was one of the richest men in the new United States. He had a 5,000-acre plantation worked by hundreds of slaves, a splendid mansion in Virginia that he had designed himself, one of the biggest wine collections in America, and one of the greatest private libraries in the world — it became the foundation of the Library of Congress. But despite his wealth and status his home was so cold in winter that the ink in his pen sometimes froze, making it difficult for him to write to complain about the chill.

Jefferson was rich and sophisticated, but his life was closer to the lives of people in the Iron Age than it was to ours. This is true literally, in that modern forms of steel and other metal alloys hadn’t been invented. But it is most true in the staggering fact that everyone at the rehearsal dinner was born and raised in luxury unimaginable in Jefferson’s time.

The young people at my table were anxious about money: starter-job salaries, high rents, student loans. But they never worried about freezing in their home. They could go to the sink and get a glass of clean water without fear of getting sick. Most of all, they were alive. In 1800, when Jefferson was elected president, more than one out of four children died before the age of five. Today, it is a shocking tragedy if a child dies. To Jefferson, these circumstances would have represented wealth and power beyond the dreams of avarice. The young people at my table had debts, but they were the debts of kings.

Jefferson lived in a world of horse-drawn carriages, blazing fireplaces, and yellow fever. But what most separates our day from his is not our automobiles, airplanes, and high-rise apartments — it is that today vast systems provide abundant food, water, energy, and health to most people, including everyone at the rehearsal dinner. In Jefferson’s time, not even the president of the United States had what we have. But few of us are aware of that, or of what it means.

The privilege of ignorance was not available to Jefferson. Monticello’s water supply was a well, which frequently ran dry. The ex-president had to solve the problem on his own. Even if he had had a telephone, there was nobody to call — water utilities did not exist. To make his water supply more reliable, he decided to create a backup system: four cisterns, each eight feet long, wide, and deep, that would store rainwater. His original designs leaked and were vulnerable to contamination. Jefferson, aided by hired architects and slave labor, spent a decade working out how to improve them. He was immersed in his own infrastructure.

We, too, do not have the luxury of ignorance. Our systems serve us well for the most part. But they will need to be revamped for and by the next generation — the generation of the young people at the rehearsal dinner — to accommodate our rising population, technological progress, increasing affluence, and climate change.

The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.

Kevin Kelly's Words Of Wisdom On AI, Simulation et al.,

Thinking (intelligence) is only part of science; maybe even a small part. As one example, we don’t have enough proper data to come close to solving the death problem. In the case of working with living organisms, most of these experiments take calendar time. The slow metabolism of a cell cannot be sped up. They take years, or months, or at least days, to get results. If we want to know what happens to subatomic particles, we can’t just think about them. We have to build very large, very complex, very tricky physical structures to find out. Even if the smartest physicists were 1,000 times smarter than they are now, without a Collider, they will know nothing new.

[---]

There is no doubt that a super AI can accelerate the process of science. We can make computer simulations of atoms or cells and we can keep speeding them up by many factors, but two issues limit the usefulness of simulations in obtaining instant progress. First, simulations and models can only be faster than their subjects because they leave something out. That is the nature of a model or simulation. Also worth noting: The testing, vetting and proving of those models also has to take place in calendar time to match the rate of their subjects. The testing of ground truth can’t be sped up.

- More Here

Happy Birthday Max!

Max would have been 19 today! 

It's been 18 years and 10 months since we met. 

Happy Birthday my love. I miss you every moment.

Thank you for the life you gave me. 

Thank you, thank you da. 

Former Golf Courses Are Going Wild

Gallons and Gallons of water are wasted everyday and worse, zillions of acres of ecosystems destroyed every day in every nation for the stupidest of fads. 

For what? 

One simple reason - Rich freaking humans want to hit a small round thing with an iron rod because there is nothing better to do. And not so rich want to emulate and signal their richness and coolness. 

I do wonder how we got this far as a species. 

Thank goodness for this good news and thank you Exploration Green!

And although residents were happy to see their flooding problems vanish, they wanted more than just detention ponds: They wanted green space, walking trails and a place for nature to flourish. It took a while, but at last, in the fall of 2023 the engineering and water retention part of the project was complete, and other than some ongoing planting of native plant species, Exploration Green is a reality. The former golf course is now part of a 200-acre nature reserve, with a centerpiece of five interconnected lakes attached to the area’s stormwater infrastructure. 

A bird habitat island on one of the artificial lakes provides a place for migrating birds to rest and feel protected from predators. Walking trails circumnavigate the lakes, and over 1,000 native plants grow with abandon on what were once perfectly manicured fairways and putting greens. The reserve is a community gathering place not just for recreation but for education, too. During Houston Bird Week in September, residents can register for guided bird walks to learn more about the many species that frequent the reserve. It is exactly what residents hoped for — including having dry homes.

Exploration Green is among the many golf courses that have been re-envisioned as places for people and nature to thrive in recent years.

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped approximately 50 inches of rain on the Houston area. “The first lake was 90 percent complete when Harvey hit,” explains David Sharp, chairman of the board of directors of the Exploration Green Conservancy, the nonprofit created to manage the site’s ecological restoration and sustainability. “There were 200 houses in the immediate area that would regularly get flooded with any kind of heavy rain. Not one house flooded,” he recalls.

Exploration Green is not the only golf course that has seen a rewilding. As golf’s popularity has waned in recent years, other courses have also been re-envisioned as places for people and nature to thrive.  

According to the National Golf Foundation, there were almost four million fewer golfers in 2024 than in 2003. The cost to operate a private golf club can be as much as $1 million annually, and with fewer golfers hitting the links, owners are not able to meet operating budgets, and courses have been sold. In 2022 alone, more than 100 golf courses shuttered across the U.S., leaving many acres of unused land ripe for reimagining. Couple this with a 2023 study which found that 97 percent of all metropolitan areas in the United States have insufficient open space, and unused golf courses become an invaluable resource.

The benefits of preserving open spaces, as the authors of the report note, are numerous. They provide opportunities for people to experience nature, socialize and participate in healthy recreational activities — something the residents of the municipalities of Churchill and Penn Hills outside of Pittsburgh are passionate about.

Bubba Becomes First Fish To Survive Chemotherapy

38 years ago, an anonymous donor dragged a large, sloshing bucket to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, USA, dropped it at the reception desk, and disappeared. When staff pried open the lid, they discovered Bubba – a giant grouper fish, presumably caught and determined too big to take care of. A note attached to the lid asked for the fish to get to a good home.

Upon deeper examination, doctors learned more about the Epinephelus lanceolatus. At the time, she was only 10 in long, and was a Queensland grouper – a species fast disappearing in nature. The "super grouper" needed treatment, so they nursed Bubba back to health and found her a new home in a tank in the coral fish exhibit, where the predator happily swelled to 4.5 ft (1.37 m) and a whopping 69.3 kilos (150 lbs).

While there, she became a popular attraction, as visitors marvelled at her mysterious origin story and compassionate change in circumstances. And when she was briefly removed from exhibition in 1998, fans were distraught.

"That's when we found out how popular [s]he was," said Shedd spokesman Roger Germann, to the Washington Post, "because we started getting letters from people saying they couldn't find Bubba on their last visit and wanted to know what had happened."

Midway though the 1990s, Bubba underwent her second big life change as she transitioned to male, as groupers often do. This is a common reproductive strategy in fish species, whereby the larger female fish in a tank change sex to male, while the smaller fish remain female – and since Bubba was so big, scientists weren’t exactly surprised!

But scientists were shocked to find in 2001 that Bubba, their beloved grouper, had cancer. 

While this usually is a sure sign of a fish’s demise, because of Bubba’s size, scientists decided to take the unprecedented step of treating him with chemotherapy. This was never attempted before on a fish, but groupers can live 30 to 50 years, so if successful, they would be making advances in cancer treatments, while giving Bubba years of his life back.

Luckily, Bubba responded well to the treatment, and he became the first fish to survive chemotherapy – and cancer! 

After his treatments, he spent many happy years entertaining visitors and serving as an inspiration for human cancer survivors. The Shedd Aquarium reported receiving many calls from people affected by the disease, especially children, asking how Bubba was and gaining strength and courage from the knowledge that he had survived his own ordeal and that chemotherapy had extended his life. And beyond that, he was a personal favourite for many at the aquarium.

"Bubba overcame some incredible odds over the years, and that's what made him so special to us," said George Parsons, director of the Shedd's Fish department, to the Underwater Times. "Every once in a while for the last three years we have been getting phone calls from kids with cancer or from their parents, wondering how he is doing." 

After regaining his health, Bubba was moved to a new home in the 400,000-gallon main pool of the Shedd's new $43 million Wild Reef gallery, so his fans could properly appreciate his beauty. He even got a new 5-inch friend – a golden trevally fish, which swims around him and eats his scraps.

"He is such a character," said Rachel Wilborn, one of his keepers, to the Washington Post. "He is so curious, always coming around to see what you are doing. If you give him a food item that he doesn't like, he spits it right back at you, then looks you right in the eye, waiting to see what else you can come up with."

After many happy years in his new home, the magnificent fish passed away in August 2006 from age-related issues. A Shedd official said his autopsy shows only “evidence of multiple organ system failure consistent with [Bubba’s] age.”

"It's going to be tough now, if I have to tell people he's no longer with us," said Parsons.

But nevertheless, even though Bubba has passed, his story lives on as a testament to the compassion of his healthcare providers and all who loved him. His body was even donated to Chicago’s Field Museum across the street, where they will keep Bubba’s skeleton as a part of its enormous fish collection and cryogenically freeze his tissue samples, preserving them for study by future generations of scientists.

"If you want to know why we went to all this effort for a fish," Wilborn said, "all you have to do is look into his adorable face. We did it for Bubs because he is such a cool fish."

- More Here

Daniel Kahneman Chose To End His Own Life

The report, published on Friday, said that shortly before Kahneman died in March last year, he sent an email to his friends saying that he was choosing to end his own life in Switzerland.

“I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. Most people hate changing their minds,” he said, “but I like to change my mind. It means I’ve learned something…” read the email Kahneman wrote to his friends before flying to Switzerland.

[---]

“Some of Kahneman’s friends think what he did was consistent with his own research. ‘Right to the end, he was a lot smarter than most of us,’ says Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘But I am no mind reader. My best guess is he felt he was falling apart, cognitively and physically. And he really wanted to enjoy life and expected life to become decreasingly enjoyable. I suspect he worked out a hedonic calculus of when the burdens of life would begin to outweigh the benefits—and he probably foresaw a very steep decline in his early 90s.. I have never seen a better-planned death than the one Danny designed'.”

His friends and family say that Kahneman’s choice was purely personal; he didn’t endorse assisted suicide for anyone else and never wished to be viewed as advocating it for others.

Some of his friends knew about his plans before he went to Switzerland. Despite their efforts to talk him into deferring his decision, he wouldn't budge. In fact, he had to ask a friend to stop after they relentlessly pleaded with him. 

“Life was certainly precious to him. Kahneman and his Jewish family had spent much of his childhood hiding from the Nazis in southern France during the Holocaust. 

His final words in his final email were: “I discovered after making the decision that I am not afraid of not existing, and that I think of death as going to sleep and not waking up. The last period has truly not been hard, except for witnessing the pain I caused others. So if you were inclined to be sorry for me, don’t be,” the report said.

“Thank you for helping make my life a good one.”

- More Here

Let There Be More Biographies Of Failures

Let there be more biographies of failures, people who were ignored by the world, whose ideas came before their time, whose great work was left in ruins.

The point of biography is to set an example, to teach us how other people did the things we want to do. That might be something grand like live a good life, or it might be something more mundane like manage a small company. Whatever it is, the genre suffers from selection bias. Only the successful get biographies.

But we will not all be successful, and if that is our main criteria we won’t learn as much from biography as we could. There’s a lot of fascinating information in Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, by Alex Wright, but some of the most interesting is about how Otlet was repeatedly let down by the world.

Otlet was something of a genius. After an unusual education (tutors until he was 11 as his father thought school was stifling, then a Jesuit school) Otlet did what a lot of interesting people do when they are young. He made the mistake of going to law school. The real benefit that reluctant young lawyers like Otlet get from their career is boredom. Their minds wander.

His passion was bibliography, the organising of information, and he devised a system based on organising and cataloging chunks of information. Books imprison ideas in structures that authors arbitrarily impose on them. Otlet wanted to break the ideas down to chunks and make them retrievable by anyone. He was thinking his way towards an analogue version of the internet. This was in 1892.

[---]

In short, he was having ideas that sound remarkably like a prototype internet. And yet he was obscure, unknown even, to the people who did eventually create the internet and the world wide web. Unlike Otlet, who favoured a massive, systematic, centralised, categorisation of knowledge, the internet was built on ideals of distribution, flat hierarchy, and emergent order. As Alex Wright says, modern internet ideals make ‘the notion of “universal classification” seem like an enormous act of cultural hubris.’ Wikpedia would be foreign to Otlet.

Right to the end, Otlet’s vision was frustrated.

So what are the lessons we can learn? It doesn’t always help to be right. Ideas aren’t easy to implement without the right combination of technology, attitudes, and luck. The work is what’s important, not the result. Maybe the cranks who fill their houses with cart loads of ephemera aren’t so crazy. Don’t make political trouble. Get a PR department. Have a partner who can do these things if you can’t. Be in the right place at the right time. Don’t get cynical, or as Churchill said, don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep working. Philosophical and ethical beliefs matter a lot to what work you do and how you do it. Don’t be so pragmatic you end up being a conformist. Conventional schooling isn’t always the best approach for your children. Worry less about imaginative young people becoming lawyers. Being bored might give them the opportunity they need to have their big idea.

- More Here

Mice Seen Giving First Aid To Unconscious Companions

When they find another mouse unconscious, some mice seemingly try to revive their companion by pawing at them, biting and even pulling their tongue aside to clear their airways. The finding hints that caregiving behaviour might be more common in the animal kingdom than we thought.

There are rare reports of large, social mammals trying to help incapacitated members of their species, such as wild chimpanzees touching and licking wounded peers, dolphins attempting to push a distressed pod mate to the surface so it can breathe and elephants rendering assistance to ailing relatives.

Over a series of tests, on average the animals devoted about 47 per cent of a 13-minute observation window to interacting with the unconscious partner, showing three sorts of behaviour.

“They start with sniffing, and then grooming, and then with a very intensive or physical interaction,” says Zhang. “They really open the mouth of this animal and pull out its tongue.”

These more physical interactions also involved licking the eyes and biting the mouth area. After focusing on the mouth, the mice pulled on the tongue of their unresponsive partner in more than 50 per cent of cases.

In a separate test, researchers gently placed a non-toxic plastic ball in the mouth of the unconscious mouse. In 80 per cent of cases, the helping mice successfully removed the object.

- More Here

Addiction to Beliefs

This phenomena is grossly underrated and under researched. We laugh at cults and mass suicide driven by these cults, 

But this belief thing is something omnipresent - slow motion version of the cult and driving addicted folks unable to shake their beliefs even at the cost of self destruction. 

Personal Identity and Willful Ignorance

Ada sits alone at a table contemplating whether she should drink the liquid from the glass in front of her.  She’s been promised that the result of doing so will be an immediate revision to her set of beliefs.  If she drinks from the glass, she will believe only things that are true.  She won’t become omniscient; she won’t know everything.  The liquid will simply replace all false beliefs she has with corresponding true ones.  Ada likes to think that she is intellectually humble.  She likes to believe that she generally acts in accordance with reliable processes for forming beliefs.  Most importantly, Ada believes that she values truth.  Nevertheless, she can’t shake the feeling that drinking from the glass would be a kind of suicide.

In The Sources of Normativity, philosopher Christine Korsgaard argues that reasons for action spring from what she calls our “practical identities.”  These practical identities are ways of conceiving of ourselves that we value and hold dear. For example, I may view myself as a friend, a mother, a lover, etc., and the reasons I have for behaving in various ways are picked out by what those identities permit or forbid.  The identities that provide us with overriding reasons are those we’d rather die than give up.  As Korsgaard says, “The only thing that could be as bad or worse than death is something that for us amounts to death—not being ourselves anymore.”

[---]

Ada is a volunteer for a local charitable organization. Her contributions to the organization provide a great sense of meaning to her life. She met most of her friends in this capacity and they’ve put together a bowling league that meets on Wednesday nights.  One person from this group has become her closest friend.  They both have mothers battling cancer, and Ada and her friend are one another’s sources of support in difficult times.  The work of the charitable organization is predicated on three fundamental premises.  If any of the premises turned out to be false, it would shatter her faith in the organization’s work.  Where would her meaning come from then? Her friends?  Her support?

Ada is married to a man with many opinions about which he seems unshakably assured. She and her husband have different interests.  Because he is passionate about what he cares about, she trusts that he has good evidence for the things that he believes.  Nevertheless, she is worried that, if she were to learn that the propositions he so boldly asserts were mostly false, she might come to disrespect him for his many flagrant displays of unearned confidence.  What would happen to her love?  Who would be her companion?

If we’re being honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that some of our identities not only involve false beliefs, but actually depend upon them.  We may not know which identities fall into this category, but it is probable that some, perhaps even many of them, do.

It isn’t uncommon to be mystified by the extent to which people seem unwilling to become better informed about social issues.  We wonder why they won’t critically reflect on the coherence or consistency of their positions, especially when widely known and compelling evidence provides good reason to be skeptical.  We wonder why they refuse to engage with sources that support any position other than those they were already inclined to believe anyway.  Why, we ask, do people often seem so willfully ignorant?

It’s hard work crafting oneself into a fully formed person. We adopt certain aesthetics or roles because they feel authentic.  Ohers are imposed upon us by our environment.  Still more arise out of trauma and grief.  At a certain point, for better or for worse, we’ve invested so much time and effort into our identities, we feel that there’s too much at stake to change them.  We don’t want our social lives to change.  We don’t want to feel differently about who we are and what we’ve done.  We don’t want different kind of reasons to motivate our actions.  We’d rather have stability than truth.

Ada knows she doesn’t have the best possible life, but it’s hers.  She’s comfortable.  If she is the source of the suffering of someone else, she’s not aware of it.  If her decisions prevent someone from achieving full liberation, she can’t be blamed.  If her choices put our most cherished institutions at risk, it surely couldn’t be her fault alone, or perhaps even at all.  She doesn’t want her identity as she knows it to be shattered.  She wants to go on being the person she recognizes.

She stands up, walks to the sink, and pours the liquid down the drain.

Finding Awe!

I am blessed. 

I lived for over 13 years in a state of Max's Awe and I still do.  has become our awe paradise. 

Thank you my love. "I" became irrelevant living and one day soon dying with you. 

Awe Is Good for Your Brain:

Some attribute the beginning of the study of awe to the Apollo 8 mission. In December 1968, three astronauts entered a small capsule—the vehicle for mankind’s first trip to the moon. (They orbited ten times but didn’t land.) Major William Anders glanced out the window in time to see his blue home planet rising above the stark lunar horizon. “Oh, my God,” he said. Then he took a photo.

Later called Earthrise, the image became one of the most famous photographs ever taken. Fifty years after Anders captured it, he said that the view of Earth changed his life, shaking his religious faith and underscoring his concern for the planet. “We set out to explore the moon,” he wrote about the experience, “and instead discovered the Earth.”

Dubbed the overview effect, the profound experiences shared by Anders and many astronauts helped usher in a wave of academic interest in transcendent events and their attendant emotion—notably, awe. Experimental psychologists tried to induce the emotion in laboratories, showing people pictures of earth taken from space, as well as videos of a flash mob performing the “Ode to Joy” movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Susan Boyle wowing the world when she sang on Britain’s Got Talent. (If you haven’t seen Boyle doing her thing, look it up; I dare you not to feel some tingles.)

For research purposes, subjects let scientists measure their goose bumps, supplied cortisol samples before and after whitewater rafting, performed tedious cognitive tasks, and were fitted with suction probes to measure something that’s called “awe face.”

Researchers pondered many aspects of awe, including why experiencing it caused some people to feel greater belonging or generosity. They speculated that awe may be the primary pathway through which therapeutic psychedelics help so many patients suffering from trauma, depression, anxiety, and addiction. They even asserted that experiencing awe may be the defining feature of our species.

For an emotion with so much riding on it, what seems surprising is that it took the academic world so long to take awe seriously.

“Science got into the awe game really late,” says Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of the new book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.

Keltner grew up in 1960s California, raised by progressive parents. All around him people were exploring Buddhism, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, and communing with nature. It was also the golden age of spaceflight. “I was raised in a historical period that was in some sense devoted to awe,” he says. “But it was a neuroscientific and cognitive mystery.”

In 2003, Keltner and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt published one of the first academic papers on the experience. In “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” the two scientists tried to pinpoint what exactly awe is. They combed through historical accounts by philosophers and mystics; what they arrived at was both eloquent and expansive.

“We said that awe is really an emotion you feel when you encounter something vast and mysterious that transcends your understanding of the world,” he says. The vastness part, he explains, doesn’t have to be literally vast, like a view from a mountaintop. It can be conceptually vast, like the anatomy of a bee or string theory or a late-night stoner realization that every mammal on earth must have a belly button.

In the two decades of research that followed, an even more remarkable conclusion emerged: that this state of mind could potentially alter us by unleashing feelings like humility, generosity, and a desire to reassess our lives. And sometimes even existential terror. Whether it’s cataclysmic or gentle, an awe experience could be an effective antidote to burnout, post-traumatic stress, heartbreak, and loneliness.

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I had to admit, I hadn’t really been thinking of this spectacle from the plant’s perspective. It suddenly seemed a totally reasonable thing to do. Most of these plants have been around a lot longer than humans have. The seeds that created this bloom were made in the past. They finally germinated during this precious wet year, but the whole thrust of the extravagant effort was to make seeds for a future bloom in an outrageous cycle of hope. Godoy and I were standing, accidentally, in the middle of a space-time continuum that had absolutely nothing to do with us. We humans just need to not screw it up.

Then it hit me: the risk of chasing awe, of making it about personal growth, is that you dilute its strongest power. Because improving ourselves really isn’t the point of awe at all. I’d been doing it wrong, and it had taken a 27-year-old human and a cluster of yellow tickseeds to help me realize it. The point is this: by listening, we find a small seam in the universe through which to feel ourselves entirely irrelevant.

 

Yes, Shrimp Matter

I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I've lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship's proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?” 

The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space. I still spend my days analyzing returns (though they’re now measured in suffering averted). I still work to identify mutual opportunities with industry partners. Perhaps most importantly, I still view it as paramount to build trust with people who — initially — sit on opposite sides of the table.

After years of practicing my response to the inevitable raised eyebrows, I now sum it up simply: ignoring shrimp welfare would have been both negligent and reckless.

This may seem like an extreme stance. Shrimp aren't high on the list of animals most people think about when they consider the harms of industrial agriculture. For a long time — up until the last few years — most researchers assumed shrimp couldn't even feel pain. Yet as philosopher Jonathan Birch explains in The Edge of Sentience, whenever a creature is a sentience candidate1 and we cannot rule out its capacity for conscious experience, we have a responsibility to take its potential for suffering seriously.  

We don’t know what it is like to be a shrimp. We do know that if shrimp can suffer, they are doing so in the hundreds of billions. 

Why worry about shrimp in a world where so many mammals and birds live in torturous conditions due to industrial agriculture?2 The answer is that shrimp farming dwarfs other forms of animal agriculture by sheer numbers. An estimated 230 billion shrimp of various species are alive in farms at any given moment —  compared to the 779 million pigs, 1.55 billion cattle, 4 33 billion chickens, and 125 billion farmed fish.

Shrimp are harvested at around 6 months of age, which puts the estimated number slaughtered annually for human consumption at 440 billion. For perspective: that’s more than four times the number of humans who have ever walked the earth. At sea, the numbers are even more staggeringly shrimpy. Globally,  27 trillion shrimp are caught in the wild6 every year, compared to 1.5 trillion fish.

Despite their size, shrimp are the proverbial “elephant in the room” when discussing animal welfare in food systems.

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The future of shrimp welfare is one of the most underexplored areas in modern animal rights, but its potential for impact is immense. We are only at the beginning of a movement that could fundamentally shift the way we treat aquatic animals — both on farms and for those caught in the ocean. While challenges remain, including entrenched industry practices and global trade complexities, the path forward is becoming clearer with each step taken by animal NGOs and progressive food companies.

For the first time ever, shrimp welfare is becoming a relevant topic within the broader animal welfare movement, one that has traditionally focused on larger animals and more familiar causes. But the staggering number of shrimp affected, their capacity to suffer, and the emerging solutions make this a moral issue we can no longer ignore. Addressing shrimp welfare isn’t just about reducing suffering for billions of animals — it’s about redefining our relationship with the natural world, expanding our circle of compassion, and challenging the limits of our ethical responsibilities.

- More Here