Micromort - A Unit Of Measure Of Risk

One problem we have is that risk is usually both relative and cumulative in nature. Vaccines work because they reduce the overall risk of death dramatically, but in almost every case, some risk remains. So you’re not eliminating a threat, you’re just lowering the odds that it will impact you. And you can reduce the risk further by adding additional measures, like masking or social distancing. So to understand the total risk that you face in a given situation, you have to understand the base rate of danger that you’re confronting, and then the relative impact of the interventions you’re considering, whether it’s wearing a seat belt or putting on a mask.

Another problem with risk is that it often revolves around very small probabilities, which can lead to all sorts of base-rate confusion. You’ll read an article about a new study that finds eating bacon doubles the risk of pancreatic cancer and it’ll sound terrifying. (I am making these numbers up, so do not adjust your diet based on them.) But what if your initial odds of getting pancreatic cancer are 1 in 100,000? Then you can just as accurately say that eating bacon will change your odds of getting pancreatic cancer from from .00001 to .00002. That doesn’t sound nearly as worrisome.

A few decades ago the Stanford professor Ronald Howard proposed a unit of measure for mortality risk. He called it the “micromort.” One micromort equaled a one-in-one-million chance of dying. Howard was an expert in decision theory, and he had recognized that many of life’s most complicated decisions—particularly medical ones—involved complicated assessments of risk probability. Howard imagined the micromort as a common framework that, for example, a doctor could use with a patient to describe the risks of undergoing a specific procedure—and the risks of not undergoing the procedure.

The standard never really took off, but it has seen something of a revival in the COVID age.

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And in the event that you feel untroubled by COVID’s current micromort levels and are planning a sporty vacation somewhere this spring, I present to you, courtesy of Wikipedia, a list of potential recreational activities ranked by micromort levels:

• Skiing: .7 micromorts per day
• Scuba diving: 5 micromorts per dive
• Running a marathon: 7 micromorts per run
• Skydiving: 8 micromorts per jump
• Climbing Mt. Everest: 37,932 micromorts per ascent

Plan accordingly.

- More Here

One of the reasons I adore Taleb is because for the first time in history, there is this one person who spent his entire life on meditating, acting and finally succeeding in educating the masses on the concept of risk. Thank you for that Taleb!! 

History will immortalize him but yet sapiens refuse to comprehend risk. I think, risk should be part of our emotional repertoire on par with happiness, grief, disgust, and anger. Maybe risk is already part our emotions - every living creature evolved with innate risk dial but we might have subsided it by sheer lack of our unawareness. 

Busy = Loss Of Soul !

I never mindlessly use the word "busy". As far as I could remember in the last 2 decades,  the only time I was busy was during Max's illness. Every millisecond mattered and was holding on to those milliseconds since Max's life depended on it. 

I think "busyness" is a framing issue. People tend to confuse their obligations of relationships, parenting, work etc., as busy. These are basic obligations we need to fulfill and if we don't then we are sociopaths. The other side of the coin is people overdo the above mentioned obligations; in machine learning terms - overfitting. 

As a human being, as a living being on this planet, to be a good person, to be virtuous and to do the right actions - we all have obligations more than being a parent or an employee. Last time I checked there is no Buddha nor Stoics alive anymore. What we have is to learn from their wisdom and act on it now. 

This present time is our time. W are the torch bearers for unleashing right actions and being a moral being. None in the past or future can do this. We have to do it. This is the greatest of all our obligations. 

The needs of a happy life are very few.

[---]

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.

- Marcus Aurelius

Most are not even aware of these other obligation leave alone acting on it and instead, they camouflage inside the busyness bubble. I don't think it is going to change anytime soon nor they understand one of the highest moral wrongs leashed by choice.

Some solace from Japanese for my aversion with this omnipresent "busyness": 

Nevertheless, I’ve come to understand that I was shaped by a society that valued being busy

But is busyness as a value all that great?

In Japanese, the characters for “busy” are made up of the characters for ‘soul’ and ‘loss’. Being busy is quite literally described as a loss of our soul.

心：soul

亡：loss

忙：busy

 

An Ultimate Touchstone Of Friendship

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them, and to have believed in them, and sometimes, just to have accompanied them, for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

- Poet David Whyte cited by Jasmine Wang on Making Sense Podcast

Roots Of Attention Distraction

Lost in an avalanche of "evidence", one forgets to ask the simple question - What is attention for? 

Is the current technology the cause of our lack of awareness and perpetual attention distraction? 

If that's the case, then we should have reached moral utopia millennia ago (given social media and video games are mere recent entrants). Clearly, utopia didn't dawn and we are still stuck in moral stone age.  Deep thinkers and realists were always a rare commodity. 

May be, we don't know what to do with our attention. What if we are viscerally convinced that our distractions deserve our most precious attention?

L.M. Sacasas ponders: 

As I see it, there is a critical question that tends to get lost in the current wave of attention discourse: What is attention for? Attention is taken up as a capacity that is being diminished by our technological environment with the emphasis falling on digitally induced states of distraction. But what are we distracted from? If our attention were more robust or better ordered, to what would we give it? Pascal had an answer, and Weil did, too, it seems to me. I’m not so sure that we do, and I wonder whether that leaves us more susceptible to the attention economy. Often the problem seems to get framed as little more than the inability read long, challenging texts. I enjoy reading long, challenging texts, and I do find that, like Carr and Hari, this has become more challenging. But I don’t think reading long, challenging texts is essential to human flourishing nor the most important end toward which our attention might be ordered.

We have, it seems, an opportunity to think a bit more deeply not only about the challenges our techno-social milieu presents to our capacity to attend to the world, challenges I suspect many of us feel keenly, but also about the good toward which our attention ought to be directed. What deserves our attention? What are the goods for the sake of which we ought to cultivate our capacity for attention?

On this score, attention discourse often strikes me as an instance of a larger pattern that characterizes modern society: a focus on means rather than ends. I’d say it also illustrates the fact that it is far easier to identify the failures and disorders of contemporary society than it is to identify the goods that we ought to be pursuing. In “Tradition and the Modern Age,” Hannah Arendt spoke of the “ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not ‘What are we fighting against’ but ‘What are we fighting for?’”

In Search For A Successor To Neoliberalism

 “Neoliberalism’s anti-government, free-market fundamentalism is simply not suited for today’s economy and society, but what comes next is still not fully developed,” said Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which launched its Economy and Society Initiative in December 2020 to focus on identifying a successor to neoliberalism. “This joint effort reflects our shared interest in replacing outdated 20th-century thinking — individualistic versus collectivist, central control versus free markets, liberty versus equality, and the like — with new ideas that can lead to broader economic justice and prosperity for people around the world. This is a first step to support forward-thinking scholars, students, and thought leaders who can break out of a patently failing neoliberal paradigm, with its ossified left-right divides, and help shape a bold new vision for what people should expect from their governments and economies.”

“In the decades since economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek first developed their economic theories, our understanding of the world and the behavior that drives it has exponentially improved. Collectively, we have made great gains in understanding the cause and effects of economic inequality; created vast online social networks that operate from pocket-sized computers; sequenced the human genome; and achieved a much more comprehensive understanding of evolutionary biology and the fundamentally cooperative nature of human beings. Yet the economic models and assumptions utilized by many academics, economists, and policymakers haven’t remotely kept pace with these advancements,” said Omidyar Network CEO Mike Kubzansky. “Now, more than ever, it is imperative that we prioritize interdisciplinary scholarship to update our knowledge of complexity to better understand our economy — the ultimate complex, dynamic system. We are pleased to join the Hewlett Foundation and our other partners in supporting a new cadre of academic leaders, and a new epoch in the study of economics and its intersection with a diverse range of fields. Together, we can change the ideas that will change the world.”

- Reimagining Capitalism: Major Philanthropies Launch Effort at Leading Academic Institutions

I personally been thinking about alternatives for a very long time. It is not easy. 

I laud this new initiative but I am apprehensive: 

• I sincerely hope this is not a camouflage to re-brand socialism. Fifty percent of this team should include right-wing/neoliberals. If you don't understand why then please quit and go read Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
• Everyone involved should have spend time in some of the most poverty and crime ridden places on earth. Read William Easterly's The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor 
• I don't care about the color or nationality of the team but the ideas cannot come sitting in a comfortable western villa . Live the life of people who will be impacted by your decisions. Read Taleb's Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life.
• Daily mantra of the team should be: Road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

MicroRNAs & Complex Octopus Brain

Abstract

Soft-bodied cephalopods such as the octopus are exceptionally intelligent invertebrates with a highly complex nervous system that evolved independently from vertebrates. Because of elevated RNA editing in their nervous tissues, we hypothesized that RNA regulation may play a major role in the cognitive success of this group. We thus profiled mRNAs and small RNAs in 18 tissues of the common octopus. We show that the major RNA innovation of soft-bodied cephalopods is a massive expansion of the miRNA gene repertoire. These novel miRNAs were primarily expressed in neuronal tissues, during development, and had conserved and thus likely functional target sites. The only comparable miRNA expansions happened, strikingly, in vertebrates. Thus, we propose that miRNAs are intimately linked to the evolution of complex animal brains.

- Full paper here

Emerging Field Of Soil Bioacoustics - Life In Soil Isn't Quite

Ecologists have long known that the ground beneath our feet is home to more life, and more diverse life, than almost any other place on Earth. To a layperson, soil seems little more than a compact layer of dirt. But in fact, the ground is a labyrinthine landscape of tunnels, cavities, roots and decaying litter. In just a cup of dirt, researchers have counted up to 100 million life forms, from more than 5,000 taxa. Underground denizens range from microscopic bacteria and fungi and pencil-dot-sized springtails and mites, to centipedes, slugs and earthworms that can reach several meters in length, to moles, mice and rabbits in their tunnels and dens.

“It’s a staggering amount of biodiversity,” says Uffe Nielsen, a soil biologist at Western Sydney University in Australia. It’s also a vital one: Collectively, these subterranean communities form much of the basis for life on our planet, from the food we eat to the air we breathe.

Today, in a relatively new field known as soil bioacoustics — others prefer terms such as biotremology or soil ecoacoustics — a growing number of biologists are capturing underground noises to open a window into this complex and cryptic world. They’ve found that something as simple as a metal nail pushed into the dirt can become a sort of upside-down antenna if equipped with the right sensors. And the more researchers listen, the more it becomes apparent how much the ground below us is thrumming with life.

Eavesdropping on this cacophony of underground sounds promises to reveal not only what life forms reside below our feet but also how they go about their existence — how they eat or hunt, how they slither past each other unnoticed, or drum, tap and sing to get one another’s attention. Life underground “is a black box,” says Nielsen. “As we open it, we realize how little we know.”

- More here

A Single Tooth Can Change Human History

A single, broken molar found buried within a windswept rock shelter in southeastern France could push back the first evidence of modern humans in Europe by nearly 10,000 years.

According to an international team, the tooth and dozens of stone tools from the same sedimentary layer belonged to a member of Homo sapiens who lived some 54,000 years ago, a time when Neanderthals were thought to have been the sole occupants of Europe. The findings also paint a remarkable picture of the intimacy of modern humans and their Neanderthal neighbors, suggesting they may have traded occupancy of the cave several times—once in as little as a year.

[---]

The paper’s findings could be revolutionary for our understanding of the transition between the last Neanderthals and the first moderns in Europe, says Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist also at the University of Bordeaux. But he and others want far more evidence. “If the pattern proposed is confirmed by future discoveries, we will certainly need to change our view of this transition,” he says. “Such a paradigm shift is entirely possible but requires … more sites and more unequivocal evidence.”

- More Here (full paper here)

A single tooth can crumble millenniums of "beliefs", "tradition" and "culture". Ideologies cement in if the mind is incapable of absorbing these realities as they unveil. So, prepare constantly to change your mind. Always.

Alcoholism, Dislocation Theory Et Al.,

I do write a lot and act on the "fact" that changing minds for good is the most fundamental and important trait than love. If my memory serves well, as a young man a long time ago, first time I had changed my mind was - I stopped blaming addicts and understood the importance of perceiving addiction as a disease.  

For years with Max, I saw addiction is not limited to alcohol or drugs but also spans across politics, sports, religion, and ideologies in general. But world still focuses only on "objective" addictions and largely ignores plethora of "subjective" addictions. 

Nevertheless,  I quit drinking on the day Max passed away and I don't miss it a bit. I was never a big drinker to begin with but the stories about addiction did scare me . I am nothing but a biological entity like other living beings. I understood the limitations of my biology.

Read this heart-breaking story of Carl Erik Fisher; who went from a budding psychiatrist at Columbia University to patient at Bellevue. There are tons of wisdom in Carl's message but try not to read with a political mindset. He almost .. almost captures the causal reasoning behind this epidemic and he understands the subjective addictions as well. 

I don’t intend to diagnose my parents or grandparents. It is rarely useful to attempt to arrive at one major “cause” of anyone’s addiction – genes, environment, trauma, the trauma of everyday life. But it has helped me immensely to see their addictions at least in part as a function of their unprocessed pain. Like everyone else, they were drinking and smoking for a reason: because those substances did something for them. Sadly, their use simultaneously helped them to cope and made their problems much worse, perpetuating a vicious spiral.

This is the core of the addiction-as-dislocation theory. Beyond soothing the concrete effects of physical dislocation, people use drugs to address an alienation from cultural supports. This kind of alienation is what Émile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology, called anomie: the social condition of a breakdown of norms and values, resulting in an existential lack of connection to meaning and purpose. This sense of dislocation, some scholars argue, is one of the core drivers of today’s opioid epidemic.

[---]

To this day, I am not entirely sure how to think about that rehab programme. Was it too harsh, or did I need to be challenged? Was all their focus on character and personality rehabilitation overkill? I am convinced that I did need to be coerced, in the sense of being faced with a hard choice. Most people going to addiction treatment are going with some form of coercion – at least informal coercion, from family and friends – and I was there because I had to be, at least if I wanted to practice medicine anytime soon. I am glad that I was coerced in that sense; if I hadn’t had the monitoring programme in place, I might not have stuck with treatment and entered recovery, and I could have harmed other people, or died myself. Still, I’d like to believe that whatever deeper rehabilitation I experienced had more to do with connection than confrontation. I didn’t really need to be broken down, and the most meaningful and transformative experiences were less about the formal treatment and more about being put in a situation where mutual help could take hold and do its work.

After residency, I devoted a year to training in forensic psychiatry. I spent one day a week at New York State’s maximum-security prison for women, and it seemed as though every patient sent to our psychiatric clinic had both a low-level drug offence and trauma history. Many of them jockeyed to get time off their sentences by going to tough-love boot camps, where their heads were shaved and they did push-ups in the snow while staff screamed at them. I couldn’t shake their stories. The injustice of how, if not for an accident of birth, my own story could have been entirely different. The NYPD chose to take me, a white guy living in an upscale Manhattan neighbourhood, to a hospital rather than booking me. If I’d been a person of colour in a different neighbourhood, I could have been imprisoned, like so many of the people who populate our current system of mass incarceration, or even shot and killed.

Disparity in access to medical treatment remains one of the strongest examples we have of the stark racial disparities in the understanding and treatment of addiction. Black and Brown people have long had to fight for treatment. Addiction in communities of colour, perennially a major problem, is too often explained in a stigmatised way that justifies prohibitionist approaches: portrayed as self chosen and irresponsible. On a structural level, addiction is explained away as the intractable effect of poverty or other root causes, treated as inevitable and expected, and thus left to the criminal legal system.

In my psychiatry practice, I see “non-addicted” people struggling with food, work, cheating, power, money or anger all the time. One psychotherapy patient of mine uses compulsive bingeing and purging as a way of managing negative emotions such as fear and shame. Another cannot put down his phone or stop checking his email – despite his clear intentions and plans to do so, and despite the fact that it causes real problems in his marriage – because of a crushing need for external validation from his work. I don’t insist that they call themselves addicted, and in general I don’t assume that the roots of my own addiction are similar to others’, or that others need what I have needed to recover. But I also don’t see a tremendous division between me and them. We all suffer from a divided self, and we all have too much confidence in our judgment and our ability to exert power over our environments and ourselves. And in that, I think we share a fellowship, in that addiction is simultaneously a tremendous problem that causes unthinkable suffering, and something contiguous with all of human suffering.

Lincoln's Standards On Doing The Right Things - Always

I do the very best I know how — the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

- Abraham Lincoln

Hmm... it's a pity, immense pity that they don't make men like Lincoln anymore. Every time I read about him, my little difficulties seem meaningless and brings tears to my eyes. That man swam against every bullshit humans can unleash but yet succeed to do the right thing. 

You are one of the handful of humans, I respect and salute sir.  An eternal thank you for what did and the standards you taught us to match and surpass. 

First reading of emancipation proclamation - painted by then 23 year old artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter

So began what would become First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln — a painting Carpenter completed in about four months. For more than a century and a half to come, it would bedeck the United States Capitol as both a benediction and a warning, for the moment it immortalizes would cost Lincoln his life and America its awakening.

Lincoln was heavily criticized for his anti-slavery views and his political idealism. One Democratic newspaper observed that “he has been prostrated often enough in his political schemes to have crushed the life out of any ordinary man.” But this was no ordinary man. He managed to effect such landmark change by cultivating a deliberate discipline in facing criticism. While his wife would later recall that newspaper attacks pained him greatly, Lincoln met them with the sole orientation that makes courageous action in the face of criticism not only possible but sustainable over the sweep of a life.

- Maria Popova

What's The Lifetime Cost Of Owning A Car?

Decades ago, I made a promise to myself that I would never to buy a new car. Since then, I always bought used car. 

Prius I have now is 14 years old filled with joyful memories of Max and I clocking miles and miles. I am not sure if I will ever give away this car since I work remote plus that memory factor plus ecology factor. 

I made another promise few years ago. The next car I buy would be my last car. but I might break my first promise because of cost, EV, utility (Neo, Fluffy n Garph can fit comfortably) and "supposed" longevity - let's see how it goes. I would try my best to keep the promise. Buying car here in US is because of necessity and I don't give a flying fuck about signaling via make and model of the car. 

I just need a car which is reliable and gets me from x to y, period. I don't build a relationship with the car nor do I make love to my car :-) 

So that's my brief history of my relationship with cars as a necessity. But even I was astonished to read this...

Cars can be convenient, but they are also incredibly costly, both to owners and society in general. New academic research has calculated that the lifetime cost of a small car—such as an Opel Corsa—is about $689,000, of which society pays $275,000. (A Mercedes GLC costs $1+m over an owner's lifetime.)

The research focused on Germany, but lead author Stefan Gössling told me the guiding principles work for other countries, too. Writing in Ecological Economics, Gössling stated that “the car is one of the most expensive household consumer goods, yet there is a limited understanding of its private and social cost per vehicle-km, year, or lifetime of driving.”

Motorists, he added, underestimate the total private costs of car ownership, “while policymakers and planners underestimate social costs.”

Cars are expensive because of their high ticket price and depreciation and the additional costs incurred by insurance, repairs, and fuel purchases. Mass motoring’s social costs—known to transport wonks as negative externalities—include carbon emissions from burning petrol and diesel, congestion, noise, deaths and injuries from crashes, road damage, and costs to health systems from sloth.

Dogs, Wolves, & Human Domestication

• Domestication is thought to alter the temperament of a species, making it less fearful and aggressive and more social, thereby promoting their sociocognitive abilities. Some authors suggest that humans are ‘domesticated’ apes.
• The wolf–dog comparison has been used to support the idea of the human self-domestication hypothesis, but more recent results are not in line with this claim.
• Genetic and behavioral studies of free-ranging, pet, and captive pack-living dogs, as well as different subspecies of wolves, can further our understanding of the dog domestication process.
• Current dog domestication hypotheses focus on explaining specific dog–human interactions rather than trying to understand dogs as a social species.
• Dog domestication is best understood as an adaptation to a new, human-dominated niche, which included selective pressures by humans.

Based on claims that dogs are less aggressive and show more sophisticated socio-cognitive skills compared with wolves, dog domestication has been invoked to support the idea that humans underwent a similar ‘self-domestication’ process. Here, we review studies on wolf–dog differences and conclude that results do not support such claims: dogs do not show increased socio-cognitive skills and they are not less aggressive than wolves. Rather, compared with wolves, dogs seek to avoid conflicts, specifically with higher ranking conspecifics and humans, and might have an increased inclination to follow rules, making them amenable social partners. These conclusions challenge the suitability of dog domestication as a model for human social evolution and suggest that dogs need to be acknowledged as animals adapted to a specific socio-ecological niche as well as being shaped by human selection for specific traits.

- Full paper here (via MR)

How Trees Secretly Talk To Each Other

 

Check out these books for more on Wood Wide Web

• Entangled life Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake 
• Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Chimpanzee's Use Insects To Heal Wounds Of Self & Other Chimps

Summary

Self-medication refers to the process by which a host suppresses or prevents the deleterious effects of parasitism and other causes of illness via behavioural means1. It has been observed across multiple animal taxa (e.g. bears, elephants, moths, starlings), with many case studies in great apes. Although the majority of studies on self-medication in non-human primates concern the ingestion of plant parts or non-nutritional substances to combat or control intestinal parasites, more recent examples also report topical applications of leaves or other materials (including arthropods) to skin integuments. Thus far, however, the application of insects or insect parts to an individual’s own wound or the wound of a conspecific has never been reported. Here, we report the first observations of chimpanzees applying insects to their own wounds (n = 19) and to the wounds of conspecifics (n = 3).

- Full paper here

If I remember correctly, Nathan Wolfe Phd thesis decades ago was on how Chimps use plants to medicate themselves. "Intelligence" is an overfitting word coined to just to stroke sapiens ego. 

Reality Is In Details!

It is easier to macrobullshit than to microbullshit.

- Nassim Taleb

John Salvatier's brilliant piece on the often"missed" link between reality and details (via Tim). 

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

That’s why if you ask an anti-climate change person (or a climate scientist) “what could convince you you were wrong?” you’ll likely get back an answer like “if it turned out all the data on my side was faked” or some other extremely strong requirement for evidence rather than “I would start doubting if I noticed numerous important mistakes in the details my side’s data and my colleagues didn’t want to talk about it”. The second case is much more likely than the first, but you’ll never see it if you’re not paying close attention.

If you’re trying to do impossible things, this effect should chill you to your bones. It means you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.

This problem is not easy to fix, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built. When you talk to someone who is smart but just seems so wrong, figure out what details seem important to them and why. In your work, notice how that meeting actually wouldn’t have accomplished much if Sarah hadn’t pointed out that one thing. As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.

If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived.

The people I admire, my mentors are the ones who lived their entire life on digging into details, acting on details but most importantly,  they dug so deep that they uncovered  rudimentary and simple actionable wisdom without any subjective bullshit. I am talking about Buddha to Montaigne to Albert O. Hrishman.

Why Feature Engineering, Domain & Holistic Knowledge Is Important In Modeling & Life

E.O.Wilson called this Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: 

Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure.

[---]

The greatest challenge today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems.

Robert Rubin in his book In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington explains why brute force math based modeling is pure bullshit: 

Sound decisions are based on identifying relevant variables and attaching probabilities to each of them. That's an analytic process but also involves subjective judgements. The ultimate decision then reflects all of this input, but also instinct, experience, and 'feel'. All the time bearing in mind that reality is always more complex than concepts and models.

A true probabilistic view of life quickly leads to the recognition that almost all significant issues are enormously complex and demand that one delve into those complexities to identify the relevant considerations and the inevitable trade-offs. With an enormous number of competing considerations, the key to reaching the best possible decision is to identify all of them and decide what odds and import to attach to each.

In order to live sanely in an uncertain world without believing in magic; we need to embrace a probabilistic view of the world plus constantly update that probability via a bayesian loop. 

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. 

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Iceland To End Whaling By 2024!

It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.

- Margaret Mead

This is great news but never confuse this for moral progress of Icelanders and Japanese Whale meat consumers. This happened because a handful of human beings who scarified many things in their lives for doing the right thing and worked untiring to raise awareness. But they knew just "awareness" doesn't work with humans and they knew they have to use every tool available to reduce pain and suffering. The tool they used and succeeded is called Economics! 

Understand, they didn't get blinded by bullshit phrase of "love" changes mind nor they believed in "conversation" changes minds. Instead, they worked hard to hit where it hurts most - economics a.k.a money. We are seeing the results now: 

Iceland says it will end whaling from 2024 amid dwindling demand and continuing controversy.

"There are few justifications to authorize whale hunting beyond 2024," when current quotas expire, Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture Svandís Svavarsdóttir said in an op-ed in Friday's Morgunblaðið newspaper.

The minister wrote it was "undisputed" that whale hunting had not had much economic significance to Iceland in recent years, with no big whale caught in the last three years, except for one minke whale in 2021.

"Japan has been the largest buyer of [Icelandic] whale meat, but its consumption is declining year by year. Why should Iceland take the risk of continuing fishing that has not yielded economic benefits, in order to sell a product that is in low demand?" she asked.

The most, yes the most difficult thing in the world is to change a human's gastro-intestinal pleasures; a learned behavior via couple of the most over hyped English words namely "culture" and "tradition". 

But yet, these people came up with a plan and executed brilliantly to change the diet of an entire nation.  

Thank you for everyone who worked untiring to make this happen. 

Max and I were able to live a peaceful life for13 years only because of people like you happened to live before our times. Thank you, Thank you. 

There Is No End

Everything I have captured in this blog in the past - my treasured life with Max might turn out to be something irrelevant for both Max and I. 

Everything I said today including the above sentence - might turn out to be pure bull shit tomorrow. 

Change is the only constant in life. That is what Max taught me. From his puppyhood to deathbed, he gave the simplest of truths without a single word spoken. 

Max and I are ephemeral but change is eternal. There is no end in anything and everything. Just always do the right thing to reduce pain and suffering. Nothing more. Nothing less. Period. 

Max not only taught me that but he helped and helping me live that every moment for rest of my life. 

And that's why those 13 plus years with Max is beautiful and eternal. There is no greater gift I can ask from life nor life can give me anything better. 

There is no end. Max and I are mere passengers who will get off sooner or later but we are extremely grateful for this journey. 

CAR-T Cell Cancer Therapies To Political Cancer Moonshot to End Cancer To Neo's Poop

Almost 50 years ago, Richard Nixon "declared" war on cancer. It was a futile effort which indirectly ended in Max dying of cancer and might kill me one of these days too. 

Where did Nixon and others go wrong? 

No amount of money can end cancer, period. 

For starters, we need rudimentary data from cancer patients and non-cancer patients to even think about ending cancer. Without relevant data - all efforts to end cancer is futile. All fancy talks are sheer nonsense. 

So if you are donating money for some organization to support cancer then understand giving your data is more precious than money. 

Yes, Max and I have donated our genes to microbiomes in the past 15 years to support research on healthcare. What is the point of living my life if I cannot do this continuously before I kick the bucket? 

Some good news; CAR-T cell therapies for leukemia showed great results. But understand - this inference is based on 2 patients. Yes, 2 data points (one can now understand how deprived the world is of healthcare data) and we have no idea of CAR-T cell actually cured it or it was just small factor in a complex system. 

A few weeks after receiving an experimental cancer therapy that turns immune cells into tumour-killing hunters, Doug Olson’s doctor sat him down to give him news of his progress. “He said, ‘Doug, we cannot find a single cancer cell in your body,’” Olson recalls. “I was pretty convinced that I was done with cancer.”

Olson’s doctors, however, weren’t so sure. The year was 2010, and Olson was one of the first people with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia to receive the treatment, called CAR-T cell therapy. When his doctors — including Carl June and David Porter at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia — wrote the protocol for the clinical trial that Olson was involved in, they hoped that the genetically engineered cells might survive for a month in his body. They knew that cancer research could be heartbreaking; they didn’t dare to expect a cure.

But more than ten years later, the immune cells continue to patrol Olson’s blood and he remains in remission. June is finally ready to admit what Olson suspected all along. “We can now conclude that CAR T cells can actually cure patients with leukaemia,” June told reporters at a press briefing describing results that were published in Nature on 2 February.

White House announced a more sensible approach to reduce cancer death (remember, they are still focusing on prevention more than actual cure): 

Taken together, these actions will drive us toward ending cancer as we know it today.

There’s so much that can be done.

• To diagnose cancer sooner — Today, we know cancer as a disease we often diagnose too late. We must increase access to existing ways to screen for cancer, and support patients through the process of diagnosis. We can also greatly expand the cancers we can screen for. Five years ago, detecting many cancers at once through blood tests was a dream. Now new technologies and rigorous clinical trials could put this within our reach. Detecting and diagnosing cancers earlier means there may be more effective treatment options. 
• To prevent cancer — Today, we know cancer as a disease we have few good ways to prevent. But now, scientists are asking if mRNA technology, used in the safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines to teach your body to fight off the virus, could be used to stop cancer cells when they first appear. And we know we can address environmental exposures to cancer, including by cleaning up polluted sites and delivering clean water to American homes, for example, through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
• To address inequities — Today, we know cancer as a disease for which there are stark inequities in access to cancer screening, diagnostics and treatment across race, gender, region, and resources. We can ensure that every community in America – rural, urban, Tribal, and everywhere else – has access to cutting-edge cancer diagnostics, therapeutics, and clinical trials.
• To target the right treatments to the right patients — Today, we know cancer as a disease for which we understand too little about why treatments work for some patients, but not for others. We are learning more about how to use information about genetics, immune responses, and other factors to tell which combinations of treatments are likely to work best in an individual patient.
• To speed progress against the most deadly and rare cancers, including childhood cancers — Today, we know cancer as a disease for which we lack good strategies for developing treatments against many of the more than 200 distinct types. We can invest in a robust pipeline for new treatments, and the COVID-19 pandemic response has demonstrated we can accelerate clinical trials without compromising safety and effectiveness. 
• To support patients, caregivers, and survivors — Today, we know cancer as a disease in which we do not do enough to help people and families navigate cancer and its aftermath. We can help people overcome the medical, financial, and emotional burdens that cancer brings by providing support to navigate cancer diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship.
• To learn from all patients — Today, we know cancer as a disease in which we don’t learn from the experiences of most patients. We can turn our cancer care system into a learning system. When asked, most people with cancer are glad to make their data available for research to help future patients, if it can be done easily while respecting their privacy. Additionally, the diverse personal experiences of patients and their families make their input essential in developing approaches to end cancer as we know it.

I always said some of the big leaps in cancer research is going to come from dogs. Because dogs don't care about sharing their data. The company AnimalBiome is doing research to understand relationship between the microbiome and cancer: 

In the last decade, research on the microbiome has exploded in human medicine, primarily due to advances in technology that allowed scientists to take a closer look at this enormous group of organisms. Veterinary scientists were quick to adopt the new technology to look at the microbiome of animals.

AnimalBiome co-founder and Chief Science Officer Dr. Holly Ganz recognized the potential of the microbiome both from a diagnostic standpoint and also as a therapeutic target. Fecal samples have been collected from Study dogs each year they have participated in the Study. We also have information about the dogs’ health history, medications taken and diet. The combination of data and specimens provides a unique opportunity for Dr. Ganz’s team to learn more about links between the types and abundance of certain gut organisms and disease.

Over the next two years, AnimalBiome will analyze 2,100 stool samples from the Study to better understand the relationship between dog microbiomes and cancer, as well as other health outcomes.

How do they do it? Because they get data from Neo, Fluffy and Garph. There is no magic bullet. 

Neo, Fluffy, Garph and millions of other data from other pets will indeed help us make a small leap in understanding cancer. One data point from Neo is important than empty rhetoric and dollars. 

Check out the one and only healthcare dataset of 270 million plus Americans that exists even after 4 decades!

 

Do Not Ask Your Children to Strive by William Martin

Do not ask your children

to strive for extraordinary lives.

Such striving may seem admirable,

but it is the way of foolishness.

Help them instead to find the wonder

and the marvel of an ordinary life.

Show them the joy of tasting

tomatoes, apples and pears.

Show them how to cry

when pets and people die.

Show them the infinite pleasure

in the touch of a hand.

And make the ordinary come alive for them.

The extraordinary will take care of itself.

- William Martin (via book The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents)

Maybe Genetic Mutations Aren't Random!

“Plants, over the course of evolution, have found a way to protect key sites in the genome from mutations. This is a very exciting discovery. You can think about how to use it to protect human genes from mutations,” 

Abstract

Since the first half of the twentieth century, evolutionary theory has been dominated by the idea that mutations occur randomly with respect to their consequences1. Here we test this assumption with large surveys of de novo mutations in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. In contrast to expectations, we find that mutations occur less often in functionally constrained regions of the genome—mutation frequency is reduced by half inside gene bodies and by two-thirds in essential genes. With independent genomic mutation datasets, including from the largest Arabidopsis mutation accumulation experiment conducted to date, we demonstrate that epigenomic and physical features explain over 90% of variance in the genome-wide pattern of mutation bias surrounding genes. Observed mutation frequencies around genes in turn accurately predict patterns of genetic polymorphisms in natural Arabidopsis accessions (r = 0.96). That mutation bias is the primary force behind patterns of sequence evolution around genes in natural accessions is supported by analyses of allele frequencies. Finally, we find that genes subject to stronger purifying selection have a lower mutation rate. We conclude that epigenome-associated mutation bias2 reduces the occurrence of deleterious mutations in Arabidopsis, challenging the prevailing paradigm that mutation is a directionless force in evolution.

- Full Paper Here (via here)