Negative-Sum Game Of US Political Ideology

Ross Dougthat hits the nail on the systemic plague that has engulfed US caused by political ideology. I have observed this very closely for almost three decades and it is true. I do feel sad when a young country full of promise and potential taking the path to ruin. 

One of the notable dynamics of American life today is that conservatives report being personally happier than liberals but also seem more politically discontented. The political left has become more institutionalist, more invested in experts and establishments, even as progressive culture seems more shadowed by unhappiness and even mental illness. Meanwhile conservatives claim greater contentment in their private lives — and then go out and vote for paranoid outsiders and burn-it-down populists.

These dynamics aren’t entirely new: As Musa al-Gharbi writes in an essay for American Affairs, the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives is a persistent social-science finding, visible across several eras and many countries. Meanwhile, the view that “my life is pretty good, but the country is going to hell,” which seems to motivate a certain kind of middle-class Donald Trump supporter, would have been unsurprising to hear in a bar or at a barbecue in 1975 or 1990, no less than today.

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For liberals the problem is somewhat different. An organizing premise of progressivism for generations has been that the toxic side of conservative values is responsible for much of what ails American society — a cruel nationalism throttling a healthy patriotism, a fundamentalist bigotry overshadowing the enlightened forms of religion, patriarchy and misogyny poisoning the nuclear family. 

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Then consider, too, that the entire organizing premise of post-1960s American conservatism was that the country as whole shared its values — hence the rhetoric of the “silent majority” and the “moral majority” — and that the problem was just an elite class of liberals, irreligious and unpatriotic but also out of touch with the breadth and depth of American society. Remove the weight of ineffective bureaucracy, end the rule of liberal judges, and watch the country flourish: That was the effective message of Republican politicians and quite a few conservative intellectuals for a very long time.

Fewer and fewer conservatives seriously believe that it’s this simple anymore. But where does conservative politics go without a traditional cultural foundation to conserve? To subcultural retreat, maybe — but if you don’t think the walls will hold, if you want a politics of restoration, it will be inescapably radical in a way that the conservatism of thirty years ago was not. And since nobody — not the policy wonks trying to grope their way to some new form of right-wing political economy, not the online influencers selling traditionalism as a lifestyle brand — really knows how to do a restoration, how to roll back alienation and disaffiliation and atomization, it isn’t surprising that conservative politics would often be a car-wreck, a flinging of ripe fruit against a wall, no matter how happy individual conservatives claim to be. 

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Thus in many ways the transformations of the last few decades are ones that liberals sought: The America of today is more socially-liberal on almost every issue than the America of George W. Bush, more secular, less heteronormative, more diverse in terms of both race and personal identity, more influenced by radical ideas that once belonged to the fringe of academia.

Unfortunately in finding its heart’s desire the left also seems to have found a certain kind of despair. It turns out that there isn’t some obvious ground for purpose and solidarity and ultimate meaning once you’ve deconstructed all the sources you consider tainted. And it’s at the vanguard of that deconstruction, among the very-liberal young, that you find the greatest unhappiness — the very success of the progressive project devouring contentment.

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Thus our peculiar situation: a once-radical left presiding somewhat miserably over the new order that it long desired to usher in, while a once-conservative right, convinced that it still has the secret of happiness, looks to disruption and chaos as its only ladder back from exile.

There is something fundamentally wrong happening here. 

I will write later on some causal reasons I think are behind these trends.

Andrew Interview With Karen Hao - On AI

A long long time ago, Micheal Lewis in an interview said something very wise about his first book Liar's Poker. I am paraphrasing here: 

"I wrote Liars Poker to expose all the bad things Wall Street is doing but little did I realize, lot of people were using this book as a 'how to guide' ! " 

I personally have lived and worked in the same industries during the dot-com bubble, real estate crisis and irony has it - in AI. 

What I am seeing is deja vu with AI - millions are using it as a ‘how to guide' to make quick buck although most know this is pure snake oil and is going to come down sooner or later. 

Tulips to AI - human freaking beings never learn.. well actually they are freaking so good at self deception (hence, I love love Robert Trivers' work) 

Brilliant interview (albeit they missed an important technical stuff - none of these was pioneered by Open AI) with Karen Hao author the new book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

Not many people make this connection but Andrew is not like other people - He puts Thiel, Musk and Altman in the same bucket as troubled creatures without morals. 

It's not clear to me that scaling AI models aggressively somehow makes it more dangerous in terms of military applications. Like, to me, the things that are dangerous for military applications are actually extremely simple AI models. Like, the reporting on Lavender that the Israelis were using to identify targets in Palestine, that was, like, an extremely basic approach. machine learning model that was practically just linear algebra. And the other thing that people worry about is autonomous weapons, which you do not use large language models to develop autonomous weapons. You use things like computer vision for identifying a target and then autonomously operating the weapon.

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A lot of the concerns that people have about AI and military is they're actually talking about totally different types of technologies than what these companies are building. But then the companies are using the confusion to their advantage to say, oh, yeah, like keep giving us all the resources to build this completely wholly unrelated AI technology.

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I'm not that interested in boardroom struggles and all that stuff, I have to say. But the one thing that does... That I did get from that is that we forget these people are humans. They have, the very brilliant ones, the ones that are making a lot of these decisions, Altman, Susqueva, Mirata, Musk, Teal, they're all complicated, flawed people. human beings. And they don't, because they're working in this industry, doesn't mean they have some sort of super intelligence or super morality. They don't. Altman himself, and this brings us to another, sort of just upsetting thing, which is his sister, which is this other story that comes out later, which also begins to just create a general sense of unease about this guy, because she has claimed publicly on many occasions that she was abused sexually by her family, including her brother. for many years, she ended up in a pretty rough state. I mean, she was, she was, she basically reduced only fans to keep herself going.

And she's the sister of this person. And they, of course, anybody involved in other family dynamics is going to, is, is, is dumb. It's obviously something I can't understand. I don't want to stand, but nonetheless, the disparity between this poor woman's utter cutoff, utter isolation, despair in such a massive enterprise that her brother is undergoing is,

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We need to focus on AI development in the future is moving away from large scale models that are intending to be some kind of general purpose tool. And we should really be focusing on small task specific models again, which is what used to be what AI actually was. And the reason is it's so much less energy intensive.

You can train, you know, a cancer detection AI model on something like a powerful computer. You do not actually need cities of iPhones, as you so eloquently put it. And, like, that's, you know, that's very little cost for an extraordinary benefit. We want more cancer-detecting AI.

We also want more AI that can reduce the energy consumption of a building. We want more AI that can help do more accurate weather prediction and climate crisis prediction so that we can evacuate people more accurately when climate disasters strike.

But what Altman might say in return is, but you don't understand, AGI will solve climate change. Of course, which she says all the time. Which we'll get nuclear fission within a few minutes once Big Brain comes on. What are we going to call this thing?

What the fuck are we going to call this giant bloody thing that we all have to worship or that has the supreme intelligence? But yeah, that is the ultimate win-all argument, which is that, look, what we're developing is so smart, it will solve all the problems it creates.

And I have a facetious answer and a more legitimate answer. My facetious answer is throughout history, there have been people that have promised some kind of thing that will solve all your problems. And they have always been charlatans. Like if someone knocked on your door in the medieval ages and was like, I have this potion that's going to solve all your problems, you just have to give me everything, like your firstborn child and everything. Like you would be like, wait a minute, something's not quite adding up here. And now fast forward to today, that is essentially what these AI companies are saying.

They're like, give us everything and then we will give you a solution to all of your problems. I mean, if you just abstract it to that level, it suddenly becomes blatantly obvious what's actually happening. This is entirely a scam. But the less facetious argument is like, they are telling us, ignore all of the current, real, present-day problems based on the promise of something potentially arriving in the future. They've never actually, you know, we cannot guarantee that this technology is going to deliver all these things that they say they will. So how long are we willing to burn down our planet and run down our resources and gouge out our economy and do all of these things for the speculative payoff? Like, at what point do we decide, wait a minute, why don't we actually just reinvest all this capital in solutions that we know will pay off?

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It needs to be dealt with by people who just live ordinary lives. And it needs to be brought back to the human. And what some of these individuals, I think of Thiel particularly, their aspirations are truly, truly important. beyond responsible in my my view and and inhuman and you see in their desire to live forever the obvious natural conclusion to where they go they want to be gods yeah and and ai and hei is really their pathway to become gods and and we're not And it is insane to do so. And we're going to destroy ourselves if we do it.

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And the one possible solace, which is the people leading these companies, are actually solid, moral, sane people. It seems to be lacking. I mean, honestly, I mean... You just observe Elon Musk's tweets and you're like, I understand this man is obviously a genius in many ways, right? The evidence of his achievements are overwhelming.

But he's out of his fucking mind. And the things he's saying are just so loony. The story you tell of Sam Altman is of a deeply disturbed person. A really fucked up person. I'm sorry. I don't know where he's coming from. I feel... I feel kind of proud that a young gay man, openly gay man, has done this. But we gays, we often spend a lot of time in childhood alone looking at computers and things. I mean, it's not an accident that we're overrepresented in many ways at the top of many companies.

But at the same time, boy, are they not that well. And they don't have... values, structures, morals that most of us would understand as solid. I mean, Peter Thiel says he's a Christian because you've read René Girard, but I'm sorry, but no, I don't see it that way at all.

Well-Defined Problems vs. Poorly-Defined Problems

I hate compliments. This is not fake-humility but I really hate compliments and to make it worse, my red flags light up about the person who compliments me. In other words, I don't trust the humans who compliment me. 

A few times in my life I received a compliment, I liked it since I work hard for it. 

That word is - wisdom. A few times in my life, I heard someone utter the phrase - you are wise. 

And I gladly took that compliment as a commitment to work harder.

Word-hard for what? To be not bad at poorly defined problems a.k.a trying to be little less stupid tomorrow than I am today. 

This such an wonderful article on the same - Why aren't smart people happier?

I think all of our various tests of intelligence aren’t as different as they seem. They’re all full of problems that have a few important things in common:

• There are stable relationships between the variables.
• There’s no disagreement about whether the problems are problems, or whether they’ve been solved.
• There have clear boundaries; there is a finite amount of relevant information and possible actions.
• The problems are repeatable. Although the details may change, the process for solving the problems does not.

I think a good name for problems like these is well-defined. Well-defined problems can be very difficult, but they aren’t mystical. You can write down instructions for solving them. And you can put them on a test. In fact, standardized tests items must be well-defined problems, because they require indisputable answers. Matching a word to its synonym, finding the area of a trapezoid, putting pictures in the correct order—all common tasks on IQ tests—are well-defined problems.

Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can we all get along?” is not a multiple-choice question. Neither is “What do I do when my parents get old?” And getting better at rotating shapes or remembering state capitals is not going to help you solve them.

We all share some blame with Spearman, of course, because everybody talks about smarts as if they’re one thing. Google “smartest people in the world” and most of the results will be physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and chess masters. These are all difficult problems, but they are well-defined, and that makes it easy to rank people. The best chess player in the world is the one who can beat everybody else. The best mathematician is the one who can solve the problems that nobody else could solve. That makes it seem like the best chess players and mathematicians are not just the smartest in their fields, but the smartest in the whole world.

THE POORLY DEFINED PROBLEM OF BEING ALIVE

There is, unfortunately no good word for “skill at solving poorly defined problems.” Insight, creativity, agency, self-knowledge—they’re all part of it, but not all of it. Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they’re also everyday questions like “how do you host a good party” and “how do you figure out what to do today.”

One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; “how do I live a life I like” is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem. The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable. The boundaries aren’t clear: literally anything I do could make me more happy or less happy. The problems are not repeatable: what made me happy when I was 21 may not make me happy when I’m 31. Nobody else can be completely sure whether I’m happy or not, and sometimes I’m not even sure. In fact, some people might claim that I’m not really happy, no matter what I say, unless I accept Jesus into my heart or reach nirvana or fall in love—if I think I’m happy before all that, I’m simply mistaken about what happiness is!

This is why the people who score well on intelligence tests and win lots of chess games are no happier than the people who flunk the tests and lose at chess: well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills. Life ain’t chess! Nobody agrees on the rules, the pieces do whatever they want, and the board covers the whole globe, as well as the inside of your head and possibly several metaphysical planes as well.

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So if you’re really looking for a transformative change in your happiness, you might be better off reading something ancient. The great thinkers of the distant past seemed obsessed with figuring out how to live good lives: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, even up through Thoreau and Vivekananda. But at some point, this kind of stuff apparently fell out of fashion.

And hey, maybe that’s because there’s just no more progress to make on the poorly defined problem of “how do we live.” But most well-defined problems were once defined poorly. For example, “how do we land on the moon” was a hopelessly poorly defined problem for most of human history. It only makes sense if you know that the moon is a big rock you can land on and not, say, a god floating in the sky. We slowly put some definitions around that problem, and then one day we sent an actual dude to the moon and he walked around and was like “I’m on the moon now.” If we can do that, maybe we can also figure out how to live good lives. It certainly seems worth it to keep trying.

 

So Messed Up Is My Species...

"Lions are the biggest group-hunting land predator on the planet, and thus ought to be the scariest," conservation biologist Michael Clinchy from Western University in Canada said in 2023.

But in over 10,000 recordings of wildlife on the African savannah, 95 percent of the species observed responded with far more terror to the sound of an entirely different beast. This animal isn't even technically an apex predator. It's us: humans.

We're the monsters lurking under other mammals' beds.

"The fear of humans is ingrained and pervasive," said Clinchy. "There's this idea that the animals are going to habituate to humans if they're not hunted. But we've shown that this isn't the case."

- There's One Super Predator in Africa That Instills More Fear Than Lions

There Nothing Contrarian In This Guy

This guy doesn't like silicon valley's biased world.

Most silicon valley idiots either believe in the magic of free markets sans morality and techno-centric-utopia which is nothing but refurbished Christianity.

And this guy doesn't even attempt to refurbish - he takes magic directly from Christianity.

Don't get me wrong, these guys are intelligent in one field and one field only - they are hyper-hedgehogs.

Well, I am talking about Peter Thiel. Here's The Gospel According to Peter Thiel:

For Kawas, Thiel’s economic and social vision borders on the mystic. “The real meaning of zero to one,” Kawas says, “is to make something new . . . the idea that we’re not stuck in the past. We can make something new from nothing . . . [and] that changes the nature of reality.” When resentful people see the world as a zero-sum place, they start redistributing assets, assigning guilt and blame to scapegoats. Instead, Kawas explains, “You can do magic. You can do tech.” This is, he insists, a “deeply Christian idea.” (Thiel himself has frequently publicly identified as Christian, though it’s worth noting that there is no Christian tradition in which the provenance of creating out of nothing—ex nihilo—is not understood as the specific and unique prerogative of God, rather than a right afforded to human beings.) It “rejects the blame” that comes from the erroneous belief that there’s “no way to change the reality.”

Thus, techno-capitalism-as-miracle: the notion that a few brilliant individuals can radically reshape the limits of human reality, which are revealed to be in part the product of intellectual sluggishness and moral fear. Thielism is the belief that a human being can—on his way, say, to a San Francisco speakers’ panel—conjure an idea for reshaping prestigious education in America. Old things must pass away, one way or another.

For starters, if he is really a so-called contrarian then he should drop the notion of "few brilliant individuals can radically reshape the limits of human reality."  No doubt he articulated some smart ideas ("capitalism and competition aren't synonyms" is a great one that made me look capitalism differently) but that doesn't make one contrarian.

Buddha was a contrarian. Ashoka was a contrarian. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were contrarians. Gandhi and Mandela were contrarians.

They shock the norm of centuries and most importantly they followed what they preached in their real life and had a huge skin the game. To call this guy a contrarian is sad.

Why many smart people believe in a single idea can change the world without any attempts to change people's minds, uh?

Do they even read any history? My hunch is they do but their ideologies are primarily driven by the want and need to be immortal. That's another flavor of the subjective needs of sapiens even after kicking the bucket.

One big thing that I changed my mind during this COVAD-19 phase is that I had deeply underestimated the lack of intelligence of some tech people who are rich and articulate nicely (that is a deadly combination - always watch out for it). I am not talking about Peter Thiel here but others like Naval, Musk, etc., who are talking gibberish with biology and complex system.

If you want proof, please go read their tweets and other posts since March 2020.

This hyper-hedgehogs missed the simplest of lessons from Smith:

Smith, to put it bluntly, knew that there is all the difference in the world between learning how to get ahead in life and learning how to live life well. 

 

Why Not Mars?

Funny, brilliant and insightful piece:

But fifty years of progress in miniaturization and software changed the balance between robots and humans in space. Between 1960 and 2020, space probes improved by something like six orders of magnitude[6], while the technologies of long-duration spaceflight did not. Boiling the water out of urine still looks the same in 2023 as it did in 1960, or for that matter 1060. Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable[7] than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less [8] to send (though it’s hard to be exact, since astronauts have not gone anywhere since 1972[9]).

The imbalance between human and robot is so overwhelming that, despite the presence of a $250 billion[10] International Space Station National Laboratory, every major discovery made in space this century has come from robotic spacecraft [11]. In 2023, we simply take it for granted that if a rocket goes up carrying passengers, it’s not going to get any work done.

As for that space station, the jewel of human spaceflight, it exists in a state of nearly perfect teological closure, its only purpose being to teach its creators how to build future spacecraft like it. The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves. At 22 years old [12], the ISS is still as dependent on fresh meals and clean laundry sent from home as the most feckless grad student.

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If the head of NOAA Ocean Exploration (budget: $25 million) or the U.S. Antarctic Program ($350 million) held a press conference announcing a plan to fulfill human destiny, they’d be carrying their belongings home in a cardboard box before sundown. But our space agency is held to a lower standard.

All this would be fine if it was just talk. But NASA spent more on their Moon and Mars programs in 2022 than the total budget of the National Science Foundation. And in 2024, they plan to start launching pieces of a new space station, the Gateway, which by the laws of orbital bureaucracy will lock us in to decades of having to invent reasons to go visit the thing.

Somehow we’ve embarked on the biggest project in history even though it has no articulable purpose, offers no benefits, and will cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war. Even the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza could at least explain what it was for. And yet this project has sailed through an otherwise gridlocked system with the effortlessness of a Pentagon budget. Presidents of both parties now make landing on Mars an official goal of US space policy. Even billionaires who made their fortune automating labor on Earth agree that Mars must be artisanally explored by hand.

The whole thing is getting weird.

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The chief technical obstacle to a Mars landing is not propulsion, but a lack of reliable closed-loop life support[48]. With our current capability, NASA would struggle to keep a crew alive for six months on the White House lawn, let alone for years in a Martian yurt.

The technology program required to close this gap would be remarkably circular, with no benefits outside the field of applied zero gravity zookeeping. The web of Rube Goldberg devices that recycles floating animal waste on the space station has already cost twice its weight in gold[49] and there is little appetite for it here on Earth, where plants do a better job for free.

I would compare keeping primates alive in spacecraft to trying to build a jet engine out of raisins. Both are colossal engineering problems, possibly the hardest ever attempted, but it does not follow that they are problems worth solving. In both cases, the difficulty flows from a very specific design constraint, and it’s worth revisiting that constraint one or ten times before starting to perform miracles of engineering.

What makes life support so vexing is that all the subcomponents interact with each other and with the crew. There’s no such thing as a life support unit test; you have to run the whole system in space under conditions that mimic the target mission. Reliability engineering for life support involves solving mysteries like why gunk formed on a certain washer on Day 732, then praying on the next run that your fix doesn’t break on Day 733. The process repeats until the first crew makes it home alive (figuratively speaking), at which point you declare the technology reliable and chill the champagne.

Unlike the medical research, there’s no way to predict how long these trials might take. A typical exploration profile[50] needs two different kinds of life support (for the spacecraft and the surface) that together have to work for about 1000 days. The spacecraft also has to demonstrate that it can go dormant for the time the crew is on Mars and still work when it wakes up.

Twenty years of tinkering with the much simpler systems on the space station have brought them no closer to reliability. And yet to get a crew to Mars, we’d need to get this stuff working like a Swiss watch. Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it.

 

Social Behavior Has A Biology

Robinson brings up this magisterial tome because of the book’s importance in popularizing its namesake field.

‘It asserted a very simple and powerful point: that social behavior has a biology,’ he explains. ‘And in that simple statement, there are two singularly important points.

• ‘First, that there’s a whole rich mechanistic underpinning for social behaviour: hormones, brain, other regulatory processes. That’s uncontroversial.
• And second, if something has a biology, it has both mechanistic underpinnings in the biological realm, and an evolutionary history. The evolutionary history is the part that is controversial.’

Wilson’s comparisons of social behaviors across different species and conjectures about the evolutionary origins of these similarities were generally well-received — until he brought humans into the discussion. 

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The Robinson lab’s 2017 study used these genomic techniques to identify common genes in unresponsive and humans with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Before discussing the study’s findings, Robinson makes several points clear.

• ‘Are there autistic bees? Are bees little humans? Are humans big bees? No. That’s not the message at all. ASD is a complex syndrome, and I don’t mean to belittle it in the slightest.
• Instead, the genomic analysis allows us to say that there are common building blocks of the social brain in honey bees and humans.’

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A deeper understanding of epigenetics has subverted the “nature or nurture” adage. These studies show that changes in our individual behaviors or surroundings can influence our epigenome — and that of our descendants.

‘It used to be thought that everything is either controlled by genetics or the environment,’ says Robinson. ‘Instead we found that, yes, it’s all about genes, but it’s also about environmental regulation of genes, and this influences heredity too. Given the comparative studies between humans and animals, there’s no reason to believe that the human brain operates any differently.’

- More Here

Most Important Sentences... To Stop An Intellectual Bullshit

The idea of AI sentience remains trapped in the misguided paradigm of evaluating non-human intelligence by its resemblance to human behavior. 

It is sad that our society is so generous in considering the sentience of machines, yet so skeptical of other creatures. 

We sympathize with software that prints “I don’t want to die,” without bothering to learn the languages others use to make the same plea.

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All life has value. Even if they aren’t sentient, the endangered wildflower and the ancient coastal redwood should not be cut. However, it is logical and noble to extend special protections to animals, whom we know can suffer pain. It is natural to be partial to our fellow humans and to feel an indescribable connection to our favorite animals. But we must acknowledge that there is no objective basis to these preferences. It is equally valid to appreciate and value dogs as it is cats, or for that matter pigs, chickens, anchovies, or oysters. Founding the case for animal rights upon the universal value of all life imparts a more robust epistemology that does not undermine itself by ranking the value of species against one another.

We all know how it feels to be hurt, perhaps even in a way that no one else seems to understand. In these moments, we wish for nothing more than someone to acknowledge our pain. Sentience imparts us visceral, universal signals which we innately recognize in others, but have been conditioned to disbelieve. Other life forms cannot describe their pain to us, yet we can still listen. If there is a line of moral worth to be drawn across our tree of life, it should be below, through the common roots from which we all grow. Our world is so much more complex and wondrous than the myth of human supremacy would have us believe.

- More Here

In other words, morons are talking about "pain" in AI while feeding by beautiful and sentinel animal dead bodies. 

Maximus @ Wawayanda State Park

What Is a Schema (Model) in Psychology? - How we use shortcuts to organize and interpret information

In psychology, a schema is a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information. Simply put, a schema describes patterns of thinking and behavior that people use to interpret the world.

We use schemas because they allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting the vast amount of information that is available in our environment. Learn more about what a schema is, different types of schemas, their impact, challenges, and more.

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How Schemas Affect Learning

Schemas also play a role in education and the learning process. For example:

• Schemas influence what we pay attention to. People are more likely to pay attention to things that fit in with their current schemas.
• Schemas also impact how quickly people learn. People learn information more readily when it fits in with the existing schemas.
• Schemas help simplify the world. Schemas can often make it easier for people to learn about the world around them. New information could be classified and categorized by comparing new experiences to existing schemas.
• Schemas allow us to think quickly. Even under conditions when things are rapidly changing and new information is coming in quickly, people do not usually have to spend a great deal of time interpreting it. Because of the existing schemas, people can assimilate this new information quickly and automatically.
• Schemas can change how we interpret incoming information. When learning new information that does not fit with existing schemas, people sometimes distort or alter the new information to make it fit with what they already know.
• Schemas can be remarkably difficult to change. People often cling to existing schemas even in the face of contradictory information.

Challenges of Schemas

While the use of schemas to learn, in most situations, occurs automatically or with little effort, sometimes an existing schema can hinder the learning of new information.3 Prejudice is one example of a schema that prevents people from seeing the world as it is and inhibits them from taking in new information.

- More Here

Local Animal Shelter CEO Remembers Impact Of Diane Keaton

Thank you, Ma'am for everything. 

You will be missed but your beautiful impact will spread for ever. 

Thucydides’s Trap & Four P's Problem Of US

When discussing the US election, he invokes his “four Ps” of how a rising power impacts on a ruling power in Thucydides’s Trap. He says all four dimensions are present in today’s US. There are shifts in power (“I used to be able to demand something or push a button, but it doesn’t happen any more”), perception (“I used to look down at you because you were smaller than I was and now I’m looking up or eye-to-eye”), psychology (“I’m accustomed to me being number one and not you, you’re threatening my identity”) and politics (“never let a serious [political] opponent get to your right on an issue of national security”). Allison observes that the Republican presidential platform next year may well advocate formal recognition of Taiwan, as one of the prospective candidates – former secretary of state Mike Pompeo – already does. “American politics is driving towards something that could become a provocation that China could not avoid,” Allison says. On Taiwan’s election, he notes that President Tsai Ing-wen cannot run again and that Lai Ching-te, the candidate of her Democratic Progressive Party, “privately is very keen on becoming an independent country [and he] is not as circumspect as Tsai”. 

A particularly striking applied historical example of Thucydides’s Trap is the build-up to the First World War, in which the rise of Germany after unification in 1871 destabilised Europe’s order to the point where it produced catastrophic conflict in 1914. On this parallel I have two questions for Allison.  

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The second question concerns blocs: Europe’s pre-1914 alliance system helped to propel the continent to war in 1914. We are speaking in mid-March, shortly after a major US-UK-Australia (Aukus) summit in San Diego and shortly before a summit between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Is the world entering a new era of big-bloc politics? Here, Allison sees fewer resemblances to conditions before the First World War. The future, he says, will be more multipolar than either unipolar or bipolar. “It’s going to be a much messier world, with many, many actors not determined by any [superpower]’s commands.”  

Again he cites Saudi Arabia – a supposed American ally that is increasingly following its own course. According to US intelligence, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist. But as Allison puts it, the Saudi response to US censure over the killing amounted to: “Screw you. You’re trying to ostracise me, you need me as much as I need you.” Allison sees the Saudi-Iran rapprochement as part of this message to the US: “You will have a lot of independent players not asking for permission, not apologising, just pursuing their interests. I think that will be the game.”  

This messier world will be a more dangerous one. I recall Allison’s lectures at Harvard on the Cuban missile crisis and ask him whether those lessons have been retained in major capitals. “About half and half,” he replies. On the one hand, he argues, Vladimir Putin understands well that nuclear war with Nato would mean the end of everything. But on the other, the chances of catastrophic misunderstandings or miscalculations are rising. “In the case of China, as far as I can see, [bilateral communication] is all shut down after the antics over the balloon. If you believe what we learned in the Cold War – which I think is absolutely right – that communication at many levels, some of them private, to reduce risk is important, [then] the absence of these is dangerous.” 

[---]

The conversation leaves me with the impression of a world careening towards yet greater chaos and conflict, blind to the wider forces of history. “I think too often, we imagine that we’re writing on a blank slate, that we can just decide what we want to do,” says Allison. How much should we feel beholden to historical patterns such as Thucydides’s Trap? He replies that structural realities determine about 80 per cent of events. Many things really are externally determined. “I might like to run a marathon in Boston,” the 83-year-old professor says. “But in this life it ain’t gonna happen, given my age.” But, I note, that leaves 20 per cent of events that can be shaped. “Exactly,” comes the reply. “There are two mistakes here. One is to be arrogant: ‘I’m actually writing on a blank slate.’ The other one is to become fatalistic.” I quote a line by Otto von Bismarck, the unifier and first chancellor of the German empire: “The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to his coat-tails as he marches past.” Allison responds to it immediately: “That’s a great reminder of how, if you fail to take hold of the coat-tails, you’re not going to get where you are going.” 

Then Graham Allison switches metaphors. “Think about a river that you are rowing in. You can try to row upstream, but only with a lot more exertion. Or you can declare to the river that it should stop, but that’s not going to do much good. Or maybe you can dam the river, or dam part of it, or maybe you can cut a little tributary.” In other words: though we must be humble before the forces of history, we must recognise where we still have agency. “If the river is big enough and flowing hard enough, there’s going to be water going somewhere. But it’s not necessarily determined that it stays in exactly the channel that it’s in.” Thucydides would doubtless approve. 

- Interview with Graham Allison who coined the term Thucydides’s Trap & author of the book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Self-Regulatory Learning

A simple idea from David Epstein's blog which could have great benefits in our lives. I think, I have been doing this for past two decades and I can vouch for this method.  

ES: Self-regulatory learning — basically thinking about your thinking. I’ve seen this in a number of domains, but was just reading a relevant study of cardiac procedures at hospitals. To simplify it: in some instances, hospital staff just racked up experience doing procedures; in others, they got some experience doing procedures, but then also had some time to reflect on and try to articulate what they had actually learned from the experience — whether it went well or poorly. This whole literature on self-regulatory learning, to me, gets at some of the challenge of learning from experience if we leave it up to intuition. It turns out that doing this explicit reflection on lessons is a powerful learning aid, but it’s also not something we intuitively feel we need to do. In the hospital study, the groups that had some experience and some reflection time performed better than the groups that had more procedural experience but no reflection time. That seems like a big deal to me.

RH: Oh, I like that idea. Because there are two ways of learning from experience. One is automatic and it doesn't take any effort on your part, and the other requires effort. And if you just leave it to no effort and rely on what you pick up, you'll pick up strange things. And therefore, what is very helpful is if you actually have to analyze some of these issues and understand why you've learned one thing as opposed to anything else. So I think the general idea of sacrificing, as it were, some experience for some thinking time is really important.

ES: I know I’ve repeated this point, but usually if we just learn from a success or failure, you will think you’re learning and you’ll keep doing something. And you may be blind to what causes the difference. If you stop and think about it, and try an experiment, you will not need as much experience. But, as Robin said, our instinct is thoughtless learning, to just double your efforts doing the same thing over and over. People like the warm feeling of learning from experience and continuing, but sometimes it’s just a feeling and they like that rather than stopping and reflecting on it a bit. 

RH: Also, the thing you're learning is how to design a better experiment the next time around. So taking time out, to not only experience things but spend that time analyzing and designing experiments is important. And it’s one of the things that we're not very good at — teaching people how to be experimenters, how to actually design experiments in the real world.  

DE: Given that peoples’ lives aren’t in labs and can’t conform to the formal scientific method, what do you think we can take to get just a little bit better in our own experiments? Maybe trying to isolate particular variables when we experiment so we have a better chance at understanding causality? 

RH: Having awareness of different hypotheses is probably the key. This can be done in real life interaction with people. You do experiments with your own family just by interacting with them. You don't necessarily analyze them as experiments, but you can have hypotheses. 

DE: You mean about why they behave the way they do or react to you or to some activity a certain way?

RH: Right. 

Embracing Radical Listening

To make global health truly participatory, the world’s health institutions must adopt a radical approach to listening to everyday people. Listening must become global health’s lynchpin.

With emerging practices like narrative medicine and participatory action research, clinical health care spaces, therapeutic environments, and nonprofit workplaces have begun to embrace radical listening as a discipline. The driving idea is that people closest to a problem are best positioned to find solutions, which health professionals can help implement by providing resources and critical technical capabilities.

A commitment to radical listening would transform global health for the better. Consider the experience of communities in Borneo — an island that’s home to poor, rural villages scattered throughout one of the world’s major rainforests, threatened by deforestation. Before attempting to implement any interventions, a team led by the nongovernmental organization Alam Sehat Lestari worked as a local partner with the international nonprofit Health In Harmony, which one of us founded. The team conducted more than 400 hours of listening sessions with nearly 500 community representatives, including farmers, religious leaders, teachers, women’s groups, and other community members.

Those listening sessions revealed a problem common across the region: Despite depending on their precious forests, residents often resorted to illegal logging to pay for access to basic health care. This insight led communities to design a holistic solution for themselves. They invited health professionals to help establish nearby health facilities, with a brilliant incentive: The cost of care would be discounted for communities that halted or reduced illegal logging. People could also barter for health services with seedlings or manure, to be used for forest restoration and farming.

- More Here

Who To Read

f you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. 

This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail.”

- Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Like everyone else, my time on this planet is ticking towards its end. 

In my 20's and 30's, I have done good amount of exploitation vs exploration strategies (search algorithms use these strategy) on what to learn and from who to learn. Obviously, I have to encountered more than my allotted quota of dead ends (books on consciousness, blue brain project to Aristotle sans the humility of Socrates)

Maria Popova has a beautiful piece on The Value of Being Wrong: Lewis Thomas on Generative Mistakes

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

We learn, as we say, by “trial and error.” Why do we always say that? Why not “trial and rightness” or “trial and triumph”? The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done.

 And for those who have nihilistic tendencies; he lays out more reality of our lives: 

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

- Richard Feynman 

 

How Geology Resolves The Fermi Paradox

Given the diversity of voices that have weighed in on the possibility that other civilizations may be out there, it is surprising that few geoscientists—people who study the one planet known to host life—have weighed in on the cosmic conundrum. Physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where is everybody?” has long lacked a geological perspective. 

That’s what Earth scientists Robert Stern and Taras Gerya offer in a recent paper published in Scientific Reports. Earlier speculations about extraterrestrial civilizations were based primarily on astronomical and technological considerations like the number of planetary systems in the galaxy and how long it might take an intelligent species to discover and begin using radio waves. That left little attention for the specific attributes of potential host planets—other than the presence or absence of water. 

Stern is a geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas who studies the evolution of the continental crust, and Gerya is a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who models Earth’s internal processes. Their conclusion may disappoint extraterrestrial enthusiasts: The likelihood that other technologically sophisticated societies exist is smaller than previously thought, because basic amenities we take for granted on Earth—continents, oceans, and plate tectonics—are cosmically rare.

[---]

Bringing a geologic perspective to the problem, Stern and Gerya propose to resolve the paradox by adding two more factors to the already unwieldy Drake equation: the fraction of habitable planets with distinct continents and oceans; and the fraction of those planets with a plate tectonic system that has operated for at least 500 million years. The values of these terms are very small, they argue, because the development of distinct landmasses and water bodies, and the tectonic habit of crustal recycling—characteristics of Earth that we take for granted—are unlikely outcomes in the evolution of rocky planets. 

With these new factors, the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy that might communicate with us falls to … almost zero.

- More Here

We Need More Jane Goodalls

Not the teachers with thick textbooks or the graphs with red lines trending up or down. I mean the voices that made you pause. That made you look at an animal not as a specimen, but as a neighbor. That made you look at a pond as a microecosystem full of life.

For many of us, those voices are growing quieter. One by one, we’re losing the great science communicators and activists who taught us to care. The ones who spoke not just in data, but in stories. Who helped us fall in love with forests, oceans, elephants, insects, and the fragile web that holds it all together.

And with each loss, the question grows louder: who’s left to carry that torch? Whose voices are we raising?

The truth is, science on its own has never been enough. Charts and reports rarely stir people to act. What moves us is empathy, love, and passion. What changes us are stories. About humans who cared, about why we should care.

Think of Rachel Carson, credited with launching the modern environmental movement, whose book Silent Spring pulled back the curtain on pesticides and reshaped environmental law. Or Carl Sagan, whose Cosmos made galaxies feel like home. These were scientists, yes, but they were also storytellers.

They translated evidence into meaning.

[---]

And among them stood Jane Goodall.

She didn’t arrive with a PhD in hand or an ivory tower pedigree. She arrived with patience, curiosity, and a willingness to sit still in a Tanzanian forest long enough for the chimpanzees to accept her.

What she found changed science forever. Chimps making and using tools. Chimps mourning their dead. Chimps hunting in groups, strategizing, forming alliances and rivalries.

But her gift wasn’t just the discoveries. It was how she told them.

She spoke about individual chimps by name, despite other scientists insisting on using numbers and codes. She refused to reduce them to data points because she had seen their personalities, their choices, their lives. David Greybeard, Flo, and Fifi are some of the names even my kids have learned from reading about Dr. Goodall's work.

That simple act, introducing animals as subjects with dignity, cracked something open in our collective imagination. It made us reconsider not just chimpanzees, but the entire spectrum of life around us.

[--]

And her words on stage, “Only if we understand, will we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall they be saved,” became a mantra for a generation. It’s not a coincidence that I’ve used a similar quote on my own Climate Ages’ mission: When we understand, we care. When we care, we protect.

For me, and for countless others, she was a bridge. A reminder that science doesn’t have to choose between rigor and empathy. It can carry both.

Now that she is gone, I keep telling friends the same thing: we need more Jane Goodalls. Not because we need more chimp researchers in Tanzania. But because we need more scientists willing to be human in public. To risk being vulnerable. To speak with care as well as evidence.

- More Here

The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters

I am going to stop using the phrase "non human-animal" from now on. 

Here's a thought experiment.. well rather a test for you: 

• What did I eat for breakfast today?
• What color is the t-shirt I am wearing now? 

If you cannot answer these "simple" questions then you are stupid and dumb. 

Sounds ridiculous?  Even the above two questions you might be able to get right by random guess.

For centuries , the "system" to "test" cognitive abilities is zillion times worse than this. 

For starters we suffer from the inability to fully grasp another animal’s umwelt.

I know so many people who never even interacted with a dog or cat even for 24 hours but look down on them. 

Review of the new book The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine Webb:

Webb, a primatologist, has no doubt about the answer. She belongs to a growing subfield of ecologists, naturalists and evolutionary biologists who argue that animals do indeed have minds, and all that goes with them, including feelings, intentions, agency and consciousness. (She urges us to avoid the term “nonhuman animal,” as it implicitly reiterates human exceptionalism, and also to use personal as opposed to impersonal pronouns when writing about animals — both suggestions I am now following, although I may be guilty of misgendering a snake as a result.)

To those of us who have animals at home — two-thirds of U.S. households, for a total of some 400 million pets, according to Webb — the fact that our cats and dogs have thoughts and feelings won’t come as a surprise. But then, why do we continue to permit the torture and slaughter of similarly intelligent and feeling animals on an industrial scale, along with the confinement and experimentation that takes place on university campuses and in the labs of pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies?

Webb argues that the culprit is a pervasive belief in human exceptionalism — specifically, the belief that humans are exceptionally intelligent. This belief, however, is wrong. As she shows, data supporting the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence has been systematically rigged in our favor.

[---]

Why is this criticism of any importance, given how convincing I find Webb’s larger denouncement of our treatment of the animal world? To my mind, the greater ideological danger is not the belief that humans are unique, but rather our tendency to overlook the limits of possible knowledge and impose our ways of being on others.

To better cultivate the intellectual humility Webb calls for and mitigate the attitudes and errors she denounces, I would argue that we must come to better understand human experience and how it sets us apart from the natural world.

 

A Day. A Miracle. A Beautiful Life

October 4th 2019. 

Max came back home after 4 days in critical condition. 

I knew that a day would come when Max would take his last breath before I did. The only thing I ever wanted was to have the moment in our home. In Max's home where we spend zillions of moments. The home where we became so close that we became distant to everything and everyone. The home where our language was smile, air was peace, and life filled with awe and wonder. The home where two living beings became one. 

But I also knew, I have no control over that moment and when and where it will happen. 

The thing I wanted the most happened at home because he was able to come back home on this day, six years ago. 

My Max came back home.

What else more I can ask from life? I just need to pay back for lifetimes to come for that moment in time. 

My Max came back home. 

Two simple beings had a spectacular time together on this planet. I am eternally grateful for each and every moment. 

My Max came back home. And one day, someday, I like to take my last breath in the same home. That's my only wish, desire now. 

There is immense beauty in this bond which has changed me in multi-dimensional ways that I can neither comprehend nor explain. 

My max came back home. 

Good Bye Dr. Jane Goodall

Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. 

As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent?

She passed away yesterday at an age of 91. 

What a life!! We all know life is short but the impact of her work will save millions of animals for generations to come. 

Thank you, Madam. 

I am blessed to have lived during your lifetime and shared this planet amongst all living beings. 

Peter Singer's tribute: 

I first encountered Jane’s work through In the Shadow of Man, which I read soon after it came out in 1971. It broke new ground, showing chimpanzees as individuals with personalities, capable of thought, problem-solving, and planning. At the time, I had just become a vegetarian and was beginning to think about the ethics of how we treat animals. Jane’s work was thrilling, and it influenced me deeply. I refer to it in Animal Liberation, using it to rebut the argument that because animals cannot use language to tell us what they are feeling, we can’t really know what they are feeling. She showed, through her close observation of chimpanzees, that the basic signals we use to express such feelings as pain, fear, love, anger, joy and surprise are not specific to our own species, so we have little difficulty in recognizing these emotions in some species.

I subsequently met Jane at an event for animals, and was very pleased when she told me that Animal Liberation had helped persuade her to become vegetarian. When Animal Liberation Now, the 2023 updated edition was approaching publication, she was kind enough to endorse the book, writing: “I became a vegetarian when I read Animal Liberation back in the 1970s. Then and there I stopped eating meat. If I’d read this revised Animal Liberation Now, I’d have become a vegan much sooner.”

[---]

Jane Goodall showed us how to look at animals differently, how to live with courage, and how to dedicate a life to something larger than oneself. Her legacy is in the forests she fought to protect, the animals whose lives she changed, and in all of us who were touched by her example.

Perhaps no single image captures that legacy better than the moment with Wounda, the chimp who turned back from freedom to embrace Jane. It symbolises the compassion, trust, and love that defined her work, and it will continue to inspire generations.

It feels right to honour her together, because although we knew her in different ways, her life led us both to the same conviction: that change is possible, and necessary.

The Omnivore’s Deception By John Sanbonmatsu

Review of the book The Omnivore’s Deception By John Sanbonmatsu:

The global destruction of other animals at the hands of the meat industry is absolutely staggering: Humans kill more than 80 billion land animals and nearly 3 trillion marine animals every year, reports Professor Sanbonmatsu. Half of the planet’s land surface is dedicated to agriculture, with 80% of that devoted to either rearing animals for slaughter or growing monocrops to feed them. Tragically, almost all of Earth’s animals are captives, observes Professor Sanbonmatsu, with just a teensy 4% of all mammals (excluding humans) living freely in nature whilst their captive brethren are confined, awaiting slaughter. Seventy percent of all birds on Earth are our prisoners too, living out their flightless lives in brief, abject misery, thanks to the poultry industry.

Professor Sanbonmatsu discusses the well-known cognitive dissonance where most people think that hurting animals is wrong, but strangely, they are not bothered by killing and eating the very same animals. This paradoxical moral blindness makes meat-eaters view vegans and veganism as threats to their moral self-image and to the core of their group identity. Such human narcissism (as Freud referred to it) also leads to open contempt for vegans and vegetarians because people see themselves as superior to other animals. Such global, systemic abuses underlie and normalize the frequent recrimination that anyone or anything that is different from their oppressors is “an animal.” In short, to be born a non-human animal in today’s world is to be viewed as being unworthy of life. And yet, “[o]mnivorism is not a license to kill; it’s an invitation to improve our moral character, to act in accordance with our better natures,” Professor Sanbonmatsu asserts.

Amongst the many arguments that Professor Sanbonmatsu makes is a discussion of Aristotle’s bizarre ideas that social inequality and hierarchy are aspects of nature, “embedded in a Great Chain of Being”. Thus, according to Aristotle, it was natural for men to dominate and to victimize women (Aristotle viewed women as “incomplete” men), for masters to dominate and victimize slaves, for stronger city-states to destroy or enslave weaker ones, and for humans to dominate and victimize other animals. Despite Aristotle’s permission to abuse and kill other animals, it has been shown, repeatedly and in numerous different ways, that raising and eating other animals is devastating for the environment and a waste of natural resources, is dangerous to human health, provides an inferior source of nutrition, is a leading cause of food insecurity for our fellow humans, and is unspeakably abusive and cruel to the other animals trapped within this system.

One argument made by Professor Sanbonmatsu that especially resonated with me is that by waging war on other animals, we are continuing the war on women, on formerly enslaved peoples and on peoples with different skin colors or ethnicities. Professor Sanbonmatsu also agrees with my personal assessment that the problem with raising and killing animals for food isn’t just bad for the animals nor for the environment, but this practice actually damages our very souls.

This is not only the best book I’ve read this year but it’s the best book I’ve ever read about the morality of ethical veganism and of animal rights. It is so compelling, so coherent, and so crammed full of relevant information that even I, as a widely-read vegan and zoologist, learned so much. It eloquently presents a well-researched, thorough, nuanced and powerful argument for ending the near-universal human habit of exploiting animals for food and for entertainment.