Wisdom Of Roger Payne

I find myself at 88 years of age, very close to the end of a long life, coming to terms with the fact that I will not be around to find out what we learn. But what I can tell you is why this monumental journey of discovery matters.

The way I see it, the most consequential scientific discovery of the past 100 years isn’t E = mc2 or plate tectonics or translating the human genome. These are all quite monumental, to be sure, but there’s one discovery so consequential that unless we respond to it, it may kill us all, graveyard dead. It is this: every species, including humans, depends on a suite of other species to keep the world habitable for it, and each of those species depends in turn on an overlapping but somewhat different suite of species to keep their niche livable for them.

But there’s a problem here. No one can even name all the essential supporting species, let alone describe their full roles. We do know that some of the most essential species are microscopic plants and animals that we kill, unintentionally, by the trillions. But we know so little about them, they don’t even have common names, just Latin names. And many are unknown, unnamed, and undescribed species.

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The challenge now is figuring out how to motivate ourselves and our fellow humans to make species preservation our highest calling—something we will never cut corners on, delay, postpone, diminish, or defund.

How can we get this idea across to the whole world? Inspiration is the key. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of The Little Prince, understood this and how to use it positively when he wrote: ”If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide up the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

I believe that awe-inspiring life-forms like whales can focus human minds on the urgency of ceasing our destruction of the wild world. Many of humanity’s most intractable problems are caused by disregarding the voices of the Other—including non-humans.

- I Spent My Life Saving the Whales. Now They Might Save Us

Meta Values - 3

Don't trust everything that comes out my mind. 

The Ends of Knowledge - Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences

The greatest error of all is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge. Its ‘true ends’ were not professional reputation, financial gain, or even love of learning but rather ‘the uses and benefits of life, to improve and conduct it in charity’.

- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)

I think this ends of knowledge piece is a good follow up to Hanno Sauer's paper End Of Philosophical Historiography. 

This is a much needed call to stop spinning the wheels on endless abstractions and start working towards consilience; E.O Wilson's famous call for unity of knowledge.  For people in love with "abstract" philosophy this is a call to not read them but incorporate them into other disciplines so that we can act on insights in everyday life. 

I mean, what makes me a little less dumb everyday is whatever way possible I try to bring all the little knowledge I have together. Say, how can the moral philosophy of Buddha to Stoics to Montaigne can help AI become ethically little better aware in the future? or something even simpler such as learning to experience a little discomfort by getting rid of plastics.

In this way, the Enlightenment offers a model of how the end of one view of knowledge production can be a launchpad for new ideas, methods and paradigms. The fracturing and decline of Aristotelian scholasticism during the Renaissance gave rise to a host of philosophies devised to replace it. The conflicts of the Thomists and Scotists, the inadequacies of revived Hellenistic doctrines, the discomforting mysticism of Rosicrucianism and Kabbalah, and even the failed promise of Platonism to provide a modern, comprehensive alternative to Aristotle led thinkers like Bacon to seek answers in other fields.

Bacon’s terms – exitus, finis, terminus – suggest a focus on endpoints as well as outcomes. Knowledge, in his philosophy, had ends (ie, purposes) as well as an end (a point at which the project would be complete). The new science, he believed, would lead to ‘the proper end and termination of infinite error’ and was worth undertaking precisely because an end was possible: ‘For it is better to make a beginning of a thing which has a chance of an end, than to get caught up in things which have no end, in perpetual struggle and exertion.’ Bacon believed scientists could achieve their ends.

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The first two definitions relate most directly to the work of a discipline or an individual scholar: what is the knowledge project being undertaken, and what would it mean for it to be complete? Most scholars are relatively comfortable asking the former question – even if they do not have clear answers to it – but have either never considered the latter or would consider the process of knowledge production to be always infinite, because answering one question necessarily leads to new ones. We argue that even if this were true, and a particular project could never be completed within an individual’s lifetime, there is value in having an identifiable endpoint. The third meaning – termination – refers to the institutional pressures that many disciplines are facing: the closure of centres, departments and even whole schools, alongside political pressure and public hostility.

How can we get anywhere if we cannot even say where we want to go?

Over all this looms the fourth meaning, primarily in the context of the approaching climate apocalypse, which puts the first three ends into perspective: what is the point of all this in the face of wildfires, superstorms and megadrought? For us, this is not a rhetorical question. What is the point of literary studies, physics, history, the liberal arts, activism, biology, AI and, of course, environmental studies in the present moment? The answers even for the latter field are not obvious: as Myanna Lahsen shows in her contribution to our volume, although the scientific case is closed as far as proving humans’ effect on the climate, governments have nevertheless not taken the action needed to avoid climate catastrophe. Should scientists then throw up their hands at their inability to influence political trends – indeed, some have called for a moratorium on further research – or must they instead engage with social scientists to pursue research on social and political solutions? What role do disciplinary norms separating the sciences, social sciences and humanities play in maintaining the apocalyptic status quo?

To some extent, then, particular ends are less important than the possibility of discovering a shared sense of purpose. Ultimately, we hope to show what the benefits would be of knowledge projects starting with their end(s) in mind. How can we get anywhere if we cannot even say where we want to go? And even if we think we have goals, are we actually working toward them? Ideally, a firm sense of both purpose and outcome could help scholars demonstrate how they are advancing knowledge rather than continuing to spin their wheels

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At the same time, these ends are necessarily interconnected, and individual research projects would likely fit into several at once. As Hong Qu argues in his contribution to our book, for example, individual researchers and teams working towards autonomously learning AI systems, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), will need more deliberate exposure to moral philosophy, political science and sociology to ensure that ethical concerns and unintended consequences are not addressed on an ad hoc basis or after the fact but are anticipated and made integral to the technology’s development. Educators, activists and policymakers will concordantly need more practical knowledge about how AI works and what it can or cannot do. Achieving the immediate end of AGI entails the pursuit of a new and more abstract end greater than the sum of its disciplinary parts: ‘a governance framework delineating rules and expectations for configuring artificial intelligence with moral reasoning in alignment with universal human rights and international laws as well as local customs, ideologies, and social norms.’ Qu explores potential dystopian scenarios as he argues that, if the end of creating ethical AGI is not achieved, humanity may face a technological end. In this way, current disciplinary divides are driving a society-wide sense of potential doom.

 

Meta Values - 2

Pain and suffering are inevitable and fundamental objective reality on this planet. Don't propagate nor amplify it. Spend life marginally reducing pain and suffering of every living being. Everything else is mostly signaling. 

How Misreading Adam Smith Helped Spawn Deaths of Despair

Let’s go back to one of Smith’s most disliked institutions, the East India Company, and two Scotsmen, James Matheson and William Jardine, both graduates of Edinburgh University, one of whom (Jardine) was a physician. In 1817 Jardine left the East India Company and partnered with Matheson and Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a Parsi merchant in Bombay in Western India to pursue the export of opium to China—which, by that date, had become the main source of Company profits. China, whose empire was in a state of some decay, tried to stop the importation of opium and, on the orders of the Daoguang Emperor, Viceroy Lin Zexu—who today is represented by a statue in Chinatown in New York with the inscription “Pioneer in the War against Drugs”—destroyed several years’ supply of the drug in Humen, near Canton, today’s Guangzhou. In China today, Lin is a national hero.

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Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand,” the idea that self-interest and competition will often work to the general good, is what economists today call the first welfare theorem. Exactly what this general good is and exactly how it gets promoted have been central topics in economics ever since. The work of Gerard Debreu and Kenneth Arrow in the 1950s eventually provided a comprehensive analysis of Smith’s insight, including precise definitions of what sort of general good gets promoted, what, if any, are the limitations to that goodness, and what conditions must hold for the process to work.

I want to discuss two issues. First, there is the question of whose good we are talking about. The butcher, at least qua butcher, cares not at all about social justice; to her, money is money, and it doesn’t matter whose it is. The good that markets promote is the goodness of efficiency—the elimination of waste, in the sense that it is impossible to make anyone better off without hurting at least one other person. Certainly that is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as the goodness of justice. The theorem says nothing about poverty nor about the distribution of income. It is possible that the poor gain through markets—possibly by more than the rich, as was argued by Mises, Hayek, and others—but that is a different matter, requiring separate theoretical or empirical demonstration.

A second condition is good information: that people know about the meat, beer, and bread that they are buying, and that they understand what will happen when they consume it. Arrow understood that information is always imperfect, but that the imperfection is more of a problem in some markets than others: not so much in meat, beer, and bread, for example, but a crippling problem in the provision of health care. Patients must rely on physicians to tell them what they need in a way that is not true of the butcher, who does not expect to be obeyed when she tells you that, just to be sure you have enough, you should take home the carcass hanging in her shop. In the light of this fact, Arrow concluded that private markets should not be used to provide health care. “It is the general social consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable,” he wrote. This is (at least one of the) reason(s) why almost all wealthy countries do not rely on pure laissez-faire to provide health care.

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Of course, there have always been mainstream economists who were not libertarians, perhaps even a majority: those who worked for Democratic administrations, for instance, and who did not subscribe to all Chicago doctrines. But there is no doubt that the belief in markets has become more widely accepted on the left as well as on the right. Indeed, it would be a mistake to lay blame on Chicago economics alone and to absolve the rest of an economics profession that was all too eager to adopt its ideas. Economists have become famous (or infamous) for their sometimes-comic focus on efficiency, and on the role of markets in promoting it. And they have come to think of well-being as individualistic, independent of the relationships with others that sustain us all. In 2006, after Friedman’s death, it was Larry Summers who wrote that “any honest Democrat will admit that we are all now Friedmanites.” He went on to praise Friedman’s achievements in persuading the nation to adopt an all-volunteer military and to recognize the benefits of “modern financial markets”—all this less than two years before the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. The all-volunteer military is another bad policy whose consequences could end up being even worse. It lowers the costs of war to the decision-making elites whose children rarely serve, and it runs the risk of spreading pro-Trump populism by recruiting enlisted men and women from the areas and educational groups among which such support is already strong.

The beliefs in market efficiency and the idea that well-being can be measured in money have become second nature to much of the economics profession. Yet it does not have to be this way. Economists working in Britain—Amartya Sen, James Mirrlees, and Anthony Atkinson—pursued a broader program, worrying about poverty and inequality and considering health as a key component of well-being. Sen argues that a key misstep was made not by Friedman but by Hayek’s colleague Lionel Robbins, whose definition of economics as the study of allocating scarce resources among competing ends narrowed the subject compared with what philosopher Hilary Putnam calls the “reasoned and humane evaluation of social wellbeing that Adam Smith saw as essential to the task of the economist.” And it was not just Smith, but his successors, too, who were philosophers as well as economists.

Economics should be about understanding the reasons for, and doing away with, the world’s sordidness and joylessness.

Sen contrasts Robbins’s definition with that of Arthur Cecil Pigou, who wrote, “It is not wonder, but rather the social enthusiasm which revolts from the sordidness of mean streets and the joylessness of withered lives, that is the beginning of economic science.” Economics should be about understanding the reasons for, and doing away with, the world’s sordidness and joylessness. It should be about understanding the political, economic, and social failures behind deaths of despair. But that is not how it worked out in the United States.

- More Here

Meta Values - 1

It is easier to not do bad than do good. 

Ecological Effect Of (Stupid & Ridiculous) Lawns

Abstract

Lawns are ubiquitous in the American urban landscapes. However, little is known about their impact on the carbon and water cycles at the national level. The limited information on the total extent and spatial distribution of these ecosystems and the variability in management practices are the major factors complicating this assessment. 

In this study, relating turf grass area to fractional impervious surface area, it was estimated that potentially 163,812 km2 (± 35,850 km2) of land are cultivated with some form of lawn in the continental United States, an area three times larger than that of any irrigated crop. 

Using the Biome-BGC ecosystem process model, the growth of turf grasses was modelled for 865 sites across the 48 conterminous states under different management scenarios, including either removal or recycling of the grass clippings, different nitrogen fertilization rates and two alternative water irrigation practices. The results indicate that well watered and fertilized turf grasses act as a carbon sink, even assuming removal and bagging of the grass clippings after mowing. The potential soil carbon accumulation that could derive from the total surface under turf (up to 25.7 Tg of C/yr with the simulated scenarios) would require up to 695 to 900 liters of water per person per day, depending on the modeled water irrigation practices, and a cost in carbon emissions due to fertilization and operation of mowing equipment ranging from 15 to 35% of the sequestration.

Conclusion

The analysis indicates that turf grasses, occupying about 2% of the surface of the continental U.S., would be the single largest irrigated crop in the country. The scenarios described in this study also indicate that a well-maintained lawn is a C sequestering system, although the positive C balance discounted for the hidden costs associated with N-fertilizer and the operation of lawn mowers comes at the expense of a very large use of water, N, and, not quantified in this study, pesticides. 

If the entire turf surface was well watered following commonly recommended schedules there would also be an enormous pressure on the U.S. water resources, especially when considering that drinking water is usually sprinkled. At the time of this writing, in most regions outdoor water use already reaches 50-75% of the total residential use. Because of demographic growth and because more and more people are moving towards the warmer regions of the country the potential exists for the amount of water used for turf grasses to increase.

- Full paper here

Evolution Is So Random - The extraordinary case of the Guevedoces

This means we should treat different sex and sexuality with care, humility and embrace diversity of life on earth.  

Yes, there are few people who take advantage of this but yet there are millions more who need our support who suffered silently for centuries. 

This piece from 2015 blew my mind (via here): 

The discovery of a small community in the Dominican Republic, where some males are born looking like girls and only grow penises at puberty, has led to the development of a blockbuster drug that has helped millions of people

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So why does it happen? Well, one of the first people to study this unusual condition was Dr Julianne Imperato-McGinley, from Cornell Medical College in New York. In the 1970s she made her way to this remote part of the Dominican Republic, drawn by extraordinary reports of girls turning into boys.

When she got there she found the rumours were true. She did lots of studies on the Guevedoces (including what must have been rather painful biopsies of their testicles) before finally unravelling the mystery of what was going on.

When you are conceived you normally have a pair of X chromosomes if you are to become a girl and a set of XY chromosomes if you are destined to be male.

For the first weeks of life in womb you are neither, though in both sexes nipples start to grow.

Then, around eight weeks after conception, the sex hormones kick in. If you're genetically male the Y chromosome instructs your gonads to become testicles and sends testosterone to a structure called the tubercle, where it is converted into a more potent hormone called dihydro-testosterone This in turn transforms the tubercle into a penis. If you're female and you don't make dihydro-testosterone then your tubercle becomes a clitoris.

When Imperato-McGinley investigated the Guevedoces she discovered the reason they don't have male genitalia when they are born is because they are deficient in an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase, which normally converts testosterone into dihydro-testosterone.

This deficiency seems to be a genetic condition, quite common in this part of the Dominican Republic, but vanishingly rare elsewhere. So the boys, despite having an XY chromosome, appear female when they are born. At puberty, like other boys, they get a second surge of testosterone. This time the body does respond and they sprout muscles, testes and a penis.

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Another thing that Imperato-McGinley discovered, which would have profound implications for many men around the world, was that the Guevedoces tend to have small prostates.

This observation, made in 1974, was picked up by Roy Vagelos, head of research at the multinational pharmaceutical giant, Merck. He thought this was extremely interesting and set in progress research which led to the development of what has become a best-selling drug, finasteride, which blocks the action of 5-alpha-reductase, mimicking the lack of dihydro-testosterone seen in the Guevedoces.

My wife, who is a GP, routinely prescribes finasteride as it is an effective way to treat benign enlargement of the prostate, a real curse for many men as they get older. Finasteride is also used to treat male pattern baldness.

A final interesting observation that Imperato-McGinley made was that these boys, despite being brought up as girls, almost all showed strong heterosexual preferences. She concluded in her seminal paper that hormones in the womb matter more than rearing when it comes to your sexual orientation.

Animals Fear Human Voices More Than Lions

Human voices cause considerably more fear in wild mammals than the sound of lions, a study in South Africa has found.

Scientists played recordings of people talking normally through speakers hidden at water holes in the Kruger National Park.

About 95% of animals were extremely frightened and quickly ran away.

In contrast, recordings of snarling and growling lions elicited significantly less alarm.

The human speech they chose to play included local languages commonly spoken in the country.

During the experiment they noted that some elephants, in response to the big cat calls, even attempted to confront the source of the sound.

The study's findings suggest that the animals, which included antelopes, elephants, giraffes, leopards and warthogs, have learnt that contact with humans is extremely dangerous, due to hunting, gun use and the use of dogs to catch them.

The fear exhibited goes beyond the Kruger National Park, as a global pattern shows wildlife tend to fear humans more than any other predator, according to the study.

The authors note that this poses a challenge for areas which rely on wildlife tourism, because the human visitors they want to attract are inadvertently scaring off the animals they have come to see.

- More Here

What a shameful trait for humans!

Second, yet another reason to stop the madness of travel and vacation. Stop going to a safari. 

Any economy which depends on travel only is doomed if not today, tomorrow. 

Why Boredom Matters?

This jumping from stimulus to stimulus is directly at odds with what is required to overcome existential boredom. Overcoming it requires deep, sustained thought about life’s purpose. It also demands concentration and perseverance in conceiving and completing long-term projects, because the most rewarding human activities are not quick or easy. They ask that we work through boredom instead of avoiding it.

One might even understand existential boredom as a wake-up call: Why does nothing seem interesting, everything dull and gray? The answer might be not that the world is boring, but that we ourselves are dull, shallow, and malformed. This ignorance and lack of formation is partly due to the usual suspects of modern culture—vacuous television programs, electronic devices in general, the advertising industry—but we have allowed these influences to shape us. It doesn’t have to be this way. Thus do we arrive at Gary’s therapy for boredom: liberal education understood as the practice of leisure.

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Finally, Gary recommends that we “remember our epiphanies,” advice he gives not so much to young people just starting out as to those of us who have been around for a while. Boredom results not only from continuous distraction or youthful ignorance but also from jadedness about the world. Remembering our epiphanies means recollecting the first time we saw something in nature or perceived a philosophical truth. It means recalling our first meaningful musical performance or skillful painting, that long-ago sudden insight into the mind of another person, or our first falling in love. We must keep hold of epiphanies like these if we do not want to turn into boring, disenchanted old people ourselves.

I think Gary ultimately has it right: The cure for existential boredom must be a certain kind of liberal or “freeing” education, which simultaneously liberates us from the compulsive seeking of pleasure and achievement and shows us the beauty of contemplation. In this wondering, almost childlike mindset, the world is anything but boring. All the impressions, ideas, and happenings we see or receive become permanently ours, filtered through our minds or “inwardly digested,” in the words of Thomas Cranmer. In our idle moments, we no longer need to run from ourselves but have stored up provisions for the welcome times of real leisure.

The irony of self-examination, though, is that we may discover that our greatest happiness comes in paying attention to everything that comprises the not-self. This is a curious kind of self-forgetting.

- Review of the new book Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life by Kevin Hood Gary

The Day Of My Life

October 4th 2019. That day, I got everything I ever wanted in my life.

Max came back home.

My Max came to our little beautiful world we built  for 13 plus years to spend

the rest of the little time left and take his last breath. 

I never felt so much joy in my life. It became the mother of all joys that nothing could top

it off nor I have any wish to ask for more from life. 

I have no idea why it happened to Max and I nor I have any idea how

I will pay back the debt to the world for that day. 

Only thing I do know is whatever bad happens in the world, how many evil

acts people unleash - I will be a force to stand against it.

If needed I will give my life for it which is easy when compared to staying unperturbed

and continue living a moral life as humanly as possible. 

I am trying and will try more. I owe that for this day that happened in our lives. 

My Max came back home.

Just writing this sentence makes me smile and cry at the same time.

My Max came back home.

What I've Been Reading

Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.

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Americans today grossly underestimate the fragility of the complex society in which we live. But an important lesson from history is that people living in pervious pre-crisis eras similarly didn't imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them.  

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin

I have been following Turchin for many years now and his work "predicted" the path that led to the 2020 election madness. And he coined the term Cliodynamics.

The book is based on models built using CrisisDB (work in-progress - global history database) that includes one hundred cases from European, Chinese, Russian and American history (no Indian or other countries yet) 

The core findings behind "End Times" faced by past societies: 

1. Popular Immiseration - The proportion of GDP consumed by the government has not changed much in the last four decades and it has grown for elites. The main loser has been the common American. 

2. Elite Overproduction - What determines whether we have a problem of elite overproduction is the balance of the supply of youth with advanced degrees and the demand for them - the number of jobs that require their skills. By the 2000s, unfortunately, as is well known, the number of degree holders were greatly outnumbering the position for them. 

Surprisingly, Turchin's research doesn't count ideology as the primary factor. 

Well.. humans are convenient creatures and ideology evolves over time. Lot of people today avoid mRNA vaccines but it's a matter of time as they get older they will embrace mRNA treatment with relish for cancer treatment.  On the other hand, "green" and "eco-savvy" people gluttonize a poor cow or worse baby cow using "veal" as a euphemism. 

I admire Turchin's rigor of applying data to find patterns in history. 

Yes, Turchin's models are not even close to perfect but if the same rigor continues for a few more years or decades (and we happen to survive) then Cliodynamics has a potential to become more robust. 

• Pundits and politicians often invoke "lessons of history". The problem is that the historical record is rich and each pundit an easily find cases in it to support whichever side of a policy debate they favor. Clearly, inference from such "cherry-picked" examples is not the way to go. 

• A relatively small set of mechanisms can generate exceedingly complex dynamics. This is the essence of complexity science; complex dynamics do not have to have complex causes. 

• What are the features of conspiracy theories that distinguish them from scientific theories? One, the conspiratorial theory is often vague about the motives of the behind-the-scenes leaders or assigns them implausible motivations. Two, it assumes that they are extremely clever and knowledgeable. Three, it places power in the hands of one strong leader or a tiny cabal. And, finally, it assumes that illegal plans can be kept secret for indefinitely long periods of time. A scientific theory, like the class-domination one, is very different. 

• First, let's avoid blaming the rich. The economic elites are not evil - or, at least, the proportion of evil people among them is not terribly different from that of the rest of the population. They are motivated by self-interest, but Mother Teresas, if absent among the ruling class, are quite rate in general population as well.