What I've Been Reading

I cannot remember the last time I laughed out so loud while reading a book :-) 

This is a master piece with around 10 minutes of reading time. 

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla.

• Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 

• Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 

• Law 3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. 

• Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. 

• Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

What I've Been Reading

When a true opening of the heart develops collectively, miracles are possible. 

This is perhaps the most difficult point of all to accept in today's cynical world, and I will not try to argue abstractly for what Adam illustrates so poignantly. 

By miracles I don't mean that somehow everything turns out for the best with no effort or uncertainty. 

Hardly, if anything, the effort required greatly exceeds what is typical, and people learn to embrace a level of uncertainty from which most of us normally retreat. 

But this embrace arises from a collective strength that we have all but ceased to imagine, let alone develop: the strength of a creative human community grounded in a genuine sense of a creative human community grounded in a genuine sense of connectedness and possibility, rather than one based on fear and dogma. 

- Forward by Peter Senge

Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities by Adam Kahane.

Max's holiday card for 2024 was quoted from this brilliant 20 year old book. 

We in America think that the political and ideological problems here are unsolvable because of polarization and people don't even look in each other's eyes, leave alone talking to each other. 

Adam beautifully explain in this book,  how even people who wanted to kill each other, worked together for a better future. 

This book teaches us that: 

A transformation in our ability to talk, think and act together. 

These are actual events from countries much worse than most countries in the world. We are talking about South Africa after Mandela's release, drug lords ridden Colombia in early 2000's, Argentina post their economic fallout to Guatemala.  

We are not talking abstract "hope" here but actual transformative events. If these people in these countries can do it, anybody in any country can do it. And we can do it at home too. 

In order to embark on that better future, read the quote from Max's holiday card. 

There are three kinds of complex problems: 

• Dynamically complex—Causes and their effects are separated by space and time, making the links between them difficult for any one person or group to identify.

•  Generatively complex—They are unpredictable and unfold in unfamiliar ways. A problem that is generatively complex cannot be solved with a prepackaged solution from the past. A solution has to be worked out as the situation unfolds, through a creative, emergent, generative process. 

• Socially complex—The people involved are extremely diverse and have very different perspectives.

Our common way of talking and listening therefore guarantees that our complex problems will either remain stuck or will get unstuck by force. (There are no problem so complex that is does not have a simple solution ... that is wrong.) We need to learn another, less common, more open way. 

There are four different ways of talking and listening based on the work of Otto Scharmer of MIT: 

• Downloading: we merely repeat the story that’s already in our heads, like download- ing a file from the Internet without making any change to it. When we download, we are deaf to other stories, we only hear that which confirms our story. This is the kind of non-listening exhibited by fundamentalists, dictators,  experts, and people are arrogant or angry.

• Debating: When we debate, we listen to each other and to ideas (including our own ideas) from the outside, objectively, like a judge in a debate or a court room. 

• Reflective Dialogue: We engage in such dialogue when we listen to ourselves reflectively and when we listen to others empathetically - listening from inside subjectively. 

• Generative Dialogue: We listen not only from within ourselves or from within others, but from the whole of the system. 

There is a remarkable story in the video below. One can sense generative dialogue when: 

The team sensed that something important and special happened during that story telling. One story seemed to flow into another, as if the tellers were all telling parts of the same larger story. 

Time seemed to slow down: I wasn't sure how long the five minutes of silence actually lasted. 

The normal separation between people seemed lessen: the team shifted from listening to each other's individual perspectives to being, for a while, a whole collective "I". 

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.

[---] 

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. 

What I've Been Reading

You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind. 

Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly. 

I had read most of it from his blog posts but yet having all these precious little sentences in one book is invaluable. Please read it and give it to someone younger. 

• Paradoxically, the worst evils in the world are committed by those who truly believe they are combating evil. Be extremely vigilant with yourself when facing evil. 

• Perhaps the most counterintuitive truth of the universe is that more you give to others, the more you';; get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

• If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of ideology. When you truly think for yourself, your conclusions will not be predictable. 

• The stronger your beliefs, the stronger your reasons to question them regularly. Don't simply believe everything you think you believe. 

• The greatest teacher is called "doing."

What I've Been Reading

This book is not about sadness - at least, not in the modern sense of the word. The word sadness originally meant "fullness" from the same latin word, satis, that also gave us sated and satisfaction. Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn't just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness - setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once. 

When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be. That's why you'll find traces of blues all over this book, but you might find yourself feeling strangely joyful at the end of it. And if you are lucky enough to feel sad, well, savor it while it lasts - if only because it means that you care about something in this world enough to let it under your skin. 

Wow!! I would in the top 0.0001% of the people in the world who hates constant happiness in life. 

Pleasure, happiness, joy are such a small subset of zillion feelings all living beings can experience in their life time. Limiting oneself to just "happiness" robs one of these other innumerable rich and wonderful experiences which are necessary for a fully lived life. 

Who knew one day I would devour a dictionary in no time plus relish each page of it? 

That's the feeling I got while reading The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. 

Here's my favorite word: 

Ambedo - a momentary trance of emotional clarity. 

You look around at all the people who happen to share this corner of the world, and imagine where they came from, marveling that all of their paths managed to cross at this particular point in time. You think back to the series of events that bought you here, your choices and your mistakes and your achievements, such as they are. All the twists and turns over the years. It wasn't what you thought it would be and yet you can still look back on all the things you've lost, and the opportunities that cat came and went, and feel a pang of gratitude that it happened at all. And now here you are, feeling a kind of joyful grief for your life, in all its blessings and mysteries and chances and changes. 

You look around with a new sense of gratitude, taking in the complexity of things" raindrops skittering down window, tall tress leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee. Everything falls quiet, and the words start to lose their meaning. It all seems to mix together, until you can't tell the difference between the ordinary and the epic. And you remember that you too are guest on this Earth. Your life is not just a quest, or an opportunity, or a story to tell; it's also just an experience, to be lived for its own sake. It doesn't have to mean anything other than what it is. A single moment can still stand on its own, as a morsel of existence. 

But after a minute or two, you'll feel your hand reaching for your phone or the car radio, eager to drown out your thoughts with distraction. Perhaps there's a part of you that's instinctively wary of lingering too long in any one moment. 

We breathe this world in, and hold on to it as long as we can, but we can't just stop there. We have to keep moving, digging around for some deeper meaning, hoping to find an escape hatch between one experience and the next. So we never feel stuck inside one little little moment, one little life. 

And maybe when you read this book, you will find some of your rich feelings and experiences has a new word for it. And when you coin a word to an emotion, maybe it will make you more grateful and humble. Just, maybe. 

What I've Been Reading

Before that day, I had always thought that I needed to be somebody in the world. That rhino and the path he walked told me something different: don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.

The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life by Boyd Varty.

What a book!! I never know Lion tracking is a profession leave alone that one can learn immensely from it. Talk about realities of life right under the nose but yet we aren't aware of it. 

Thank you Boyd Varty for penning your experiences in the beautiful book. 

• That’s how mentors should be made: not through titles or words but through actions. On the ground, in the face of a leopard, one feels acutely alone. To be guided in a moment like that, with such extreme stakes, creates a bond that is rare in modern life. 

• Unlike modern men who have been taught to live in competition, Renias lives in profound relation with his surroundings.  

• Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death.  

• I transition from endless doing into a steady being.  

• Trackers try things. The tracker on a lost track enters a process of rediscovery that is fluid. He relies on a process of elimination, inquiry, conformation; a process of discovery and feedback. He enters a ritual of focused attention. As paradoxical as it sounds, going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track. Alex and Renias call this "the path of not here." No action is considered a waste, and the key is to keep moving, readjusting, welcoming feedback. The path of not here is part of the path of here.  

• The core of coaching does have a powerful central premise: you beliefs about life are not a reality. A great coach asks you to question your deeply held beliefs and rules for yourself. You can go only as far into the experience of creating life as the limits of your personal belief system will allow.  

• If you never left a place, you may never know how deeply it has gone into your cells. Only in its absence, a world away in another land, would you hear its song calling back to you, playing the music of your longing.  

• The tracker reimagines the hypothesis based on new evidence. He then does what scientists who have studied tracking call "speculative deductive tracking." 

• In truth I am done. I could go home now and be happy. I hear Joseph Campbell: "People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive." If that was it, I found it.  

• Step off the superhighway of modern life and go quietly onto your own track. Go to a new trail where you can hear the whisper of your wild self in the echoes of the forest. Fin the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus. Live deeply in your own inner guidance. There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them. 

The miracle is not walking on water; the miracle is walking on the earth. The miracle is all around us as the awareness of life itself. 

- Thich Nhat Hahn

And the final thoughts from Boyd: 

You must become a tracker and set out on the trail of your wild life. If you track your authentic life and uncover its meaning, it will catalyze other possibilities for living, and what's important to you will immediately change. Meaning doesn't want more; when you're in deep touch with your wild self, you know you have enough and are enough. From that place of enough, you act in service, because that's what feeds you. It's a lot of individuals going on that journey of discovery that will create transformation. 

Remember to prepare for the call. Know the call when it comes by the fact that not doing it would feel profoundly wrong. Open yourself to the unknown. Develop your track awareness. Amidst all of the information that surrounds us, learn to see what is deeply important to you. Use the feelings in your body as a guide. Live on the first tracks. 

Anything that puts you into your essence, no matter how small, is valuable. Even if you don't know where it's going, play with it. Find friends to track with, lose the track, keep trying things, get feedback. Find your flow and remember to see how many unexpected things come into your life by living this way. It will be scary at times. Let the fear bring you to life. I suspect that if you give yourself the room to live each day as a tracker, a deep calling to serve will emerge. 

What I've Been Reading

If you find yourself sliding into alcoholism, compassionate friends may try to intervene, to help you steer in the direction of a healthier life but speed (busy) addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being "driven". 

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

I have been reading Oliver's Guardian pieces for close to two decades and he is one of those rare decent human beings. 

Time is short. Focus only on things that matters most and ignore rest since we will never have time for all of it. Period. 

That is the summary of this book and also, summary of my life with Max (and still continuous). I am ruthless in who, where, and how of sharing my limited time. I knew from the beginning that my time with Max was limited and I wanted to spend every microsecond possible with him - after all Max and I had way lesser than four thousand weeks (less than 700 weeks to be precise). 

Oliver is a gifted writer plus this book is also his personal story with time. Please read but more importantly embrace and act on the message.

We don’t get or have time at all, that instead we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To “master” them first entails getting outside of them, splitting off from them. But where would we go?

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is the river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is the tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. 

There’s no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state - because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations. 

What I've Been Reading

Bertolt by Jacques Goldstyn. 

This is an illustrated children's book that portray's a beautiful friendship between a boy named Bertolt and an Oak tree. 

You can finish the book in couple of minutes but the melancholy will linger a life time. I wish there were more children books that portray such unique and precious relationships on earth. 

An entire generation of men who grew up reading Marvel comics are obsessed with empty space and "conquering emptiness" with flamboyant vehicles. At this point their brains are so over-fitted with this crap that they live and die without realizing immense beauty under their nose. These men have become role model for kids (and yeah, grown men too); such is the state of our civilization. 

We need to perpetually teach and remind kids the preciousness and rareness of everything in this blue planet. 

I grew up listening to this story of a Tamil king who gave his golden chariot so that a jasmine plant can use it as a support. History does remembers and salutes such beautiful acts and relationships. 

If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs.

- E. O. Wilson: Biophilia, The Diversity of Life, Naturalist

What I've Been Reading

Nevertheless, mosquitoes and water provide narrow paths from one host to the next. Mosquitoes, for example, are not syringes. They are fully functional animals that have their own immune systems, and even those microbes that can manage to evade mosquitoes' defenses will be limited to those in the blood. Similarly, water generally passes on those microbes that live in the digestive tract. Hunting and butchering, in contrast provide superhighways connecting a hunting species directly with the microbes in every tissue of the prey. 

I've never become completely accustomed to exactly what is required to prepare meat for consumption.  We take for granted what it means to remove hair and skin from a dead animal, the effort needed to separate meat from many bones distributed in an animal to support its movement. We forget how many parts of an animal must be negotiated to get the prime cuts: the lungs, the spleen, the cartilage. Watching the process on the dirt floor of a hut or on leaves spread out on the ground in a hunting camp, seeing the blood-covered hands that separate the various parts of the animal and hearing bits of discarded meat and bone hit the floor still shocks me. It also helps to remind me of the microbial significance of the event. 

The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age by Nathan Wolfe; who is aptly called the Indiana Jones of virus hunters. 

Max was little over three years, when I first listened to Nathan Wolfe interview - Waiting For The Next Plague on Edge. That was on January 30th 2009 (Yes, I was following Edge everyday that time). 

Fast forward to March 2020 - exactly 11 years and 2 months later, after the COVID pandemic hit, I went to my basement to dig through my "preparations" for a future pandemic. Surprisingly, I found masks, medical supplies etc., which I bought in 2009 after listening to Nathan's interview. 

For once, I was happy with myself that I acted on what learned and didn't just accumulated knowledge for the sake of knowing. Nothing matters in life than action. 

An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.

- Buddha 

In other words, I was expecting a pandemic for over a decade. 

• Viruses, the most diverse forms of life, remained completely opaque to humans until a meager one hundred years ago with Beijerinck's discovery. 
• Category Four agents represents the final steps on the journey to become a human-specific microbe. Whether or not monkeypox has the potential to join the pantheon of our Category Four agents remains to be seen. Microbes that reach Category Four can live exclusively in humans while simultaneously continuing to liv in animal reservoirs. Monkeypox still ranks as a Category Three agent, but that could certainly change. 
• Checkout how chytrid fungus has resulted in global grog deaths and in some cases extinction of entire grog species, a tragic loss of wildlife on our planet. What happened with the chyrid fungus also gives us important clues to a larger phenomenon that affects much more than amphibians. 
• The number of livestock on the planet now boggles the mind but the way that they're transformed into meat also differs in important ways from how it's been done since domestication began. Historically, a single animal would feed a family or at most a village. With the evident of processed meats, a single hot dog consumed at a baseball game can consist of multiple species (pig, turkey, cattle) and contain meat derived from hundred of animals. When you bite into that hot dog, you're literally biting into what was only a few decades ago an entire farm. Combining the meat of many animals and then distributing it to many people has obvious consequences. Connecting thousands of animals with thousands of consumers means that an average meat today will consume bit of millions of animals during their lifetime. What previously was a direct connection between one animal and one consumer is now a massively interconnected network of animal parts and those that eat them. And while cooking the meat certainly eliminates many of the risks, the massive number of interactions increases the potential that a rouge agent will make the jump. 
• Understand the term "emerging genes".
• Only a trivial fraction of the global ape population are under the watchful eye of woefully underfunded primatologists. If we're relying on these scientists to regularly capture the animal epidemics that could signal future human plagues, then we're destined to fail. To truly catch epidemics, we'll need to do more. 
• Please fund and support people who listen to "viral chatter".
• Steve Quake, a scientist working to change the ways we can forecast microbial evolution is not a microbiologist at all but rather a physics-trained bioengineer. 
• It is important to understand that all viruses are not our enemies. Safe viruses are some of the best friends we have in fighting the deadly ones. 
• Using one microbe to prevent another microbe from causing disease is pretty amazing. This is something that's increasingly explored in the nascent field of virotherapy. 
• Consider the human body. Only about one out every ten cells between your hat and shoes is human - the other nine belong to masses of bacteria that coat our skin, live in ur guts, and thrive in our mouths. The bacteria and viruses represented by thousands of species will outnumber the human genes every time. 
• There are gentle microbes out there - bugs that helps us, defend us, and live quietly within us doing no harm at all. If we could accurately determine which of those microbes on our bodies and in the environment were beneficial to us and which are rogue, we'd find something pleasantly surprising: the harmful ones are certainly in the minority. The goal of public health should not be to have a completely sterile world but to find the rogue elements and control them. A key part of addressing the nasty microbes will be to cultivate the microbes that help us. One day soon, the way we protect ourselves may be by propping up with bugs that live within us rather than knocking them down. 
• One day we may be able to rank the greatest future risks for pandemics, but for now we cannot. We know that they'll almost certainly be microbes that come from animals and that some spots around the world pose greater risks for their entry. 
• Among the most substantive risks for the emergence of a novel pandemics is the close contact between humans and animals, particularly wild mammals. Changing human behavior to decrease this sort of contact can begin long before we have an ideal prediction systems in place. 

The term "Risk Literacy" is an important one. The idea that part of the solution is having an informed public that can understand and appropriately interpret information on pandemics.  

Risk literacy, the ability to distinguish between different levels of severity, is not only for policy makers. Effective response to natural disasters depends on individual people and how well they stay calm and follow instructions. The constant barrage of threats articulated by the media has led to chronic risk habituation. The only way to break that logjam is for everyone to understand risk, to be able to assess the different kinds of disasters, and respond appropriately to them.  

Widespread risk literacy will help the public support the massive government expenditures that will be needed to appropriately predict and prevent pandemics. It will give a sense of how best to expend funds. 

From April 2001 to August 2002, a period which includes the 9/11 attacks, it's estimated that around eight thousand people died from terrorism. From April 2009 to August 2010, the same period of time but eight years later, over eighteen thousand people were confirmed dead from H1N1 pandemic alone - a pandemic dismissed by the public as insignificant. And that number is certainly an underestimate. 

I'm not claiming that proportionality in deaths is the only factor we should take into account when preparing for threats. But the trillions of dollars spent to prevent terrorism seem wildly disproportionate to actual risks when put the threats in proper context. 

 

The number one issue and the only issue which caused COVID and will cause future pandemics are our brutal relationship with animals; our fellow sentient creatures who we share this beautiful blue planet. 

Our mindless diet focusing only on tradition, gastrointestinal pleasures and sheer habit with no remorse for billions of animal sufferings nor our own health nor an understanding of that significant microbial event we leash every time we kill and chew meat. The truth is even after 18 months of COVID pandemic majority of the sapiens don't want to hear this nor don't want to change their diet. 

So, I am waiting and preparing for the next plague or worse, the final plague. 

What I've Been Reading

Unicellular genes that enhance competition and survival are precisely those genes that cause cancer in multicellular organisms. The seed of cancer already exists in every multicellular organism, because it is simply a remnant of our evolutionary past. When the new rule break down, the old unicellular behaviors reassert themselves. The seed of cancer grows, is immortal, moves around, and uses the Warburg effect. This is an ancient tool kit of survival responses. These are the hallmarks of cancer. This is the new invasive species known as cancer. 

The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery by Dr. Jason Fung.

Dr. Jason's book was published few months after Max passed away but until I read this book, I have no idea that cancer is a unicellular organism that was competing with Max and every one of us who are multicellular organisms. This changes everything I knew about cancer and the treatment options. To be clear, none of the treatments given to Max nor available now are nothing but playing Russian roulette with not only genetics, lifestyle, ecology but against a primordial unicellular organism which is evolved before we did. 

What is Cancer?

The term cancer does not refer to a single disease, but denotes a collection of many different diseases related to certain qualities. Something can be considered cancer when it has the following 8 characteristics:

• Grows
• It sustains proliferative signaling
• It evades growth suppressors
• It resists cell death
• It induces angiogenesis.
• Is Immortal
• It enables replicative immortality
• Moves Around
• It activates invasion and metastasis
• It evades immune destruction
• Uses the Warburg Effect
• It deregulates cellular energetics

Benign cancer shares all the first five characteristics and without the ability to metastasize, cancer is more a nuisance than a serious health concern. 

Somatic Mutation Theory (SMT)

The basic postulates of SMT include: 

1. Cancer is caused by acquiring multiple DNA mutations.
2. These mutations accumulate randomly.
3. The cells in the tumor are all derived from one original clone. 

The somatic mutation theory of carcinogenesis patched together all the disparate know causes of cancer into a coherent, unified theory (mine: very similar to a religious, free-market, or soviet style ideologies).  This paradigm focused research from extrinsic agents (chemicals, radiations, and viruses) onto intrinsic defects (genetic mutations). 

The great contemporary thinker and philosopher Nassim Taleb often uses this allegory of the Procrustean bed to describe how facts are often tortured to fit a certain narrative. The widely and often blindly followed somatic mutation theory of cancer required a Procrustean bed to fit the facts, too. 

Cancer was far, far more different genetically than they were alike since:

• Different types of cancer had different mutations 
• The same type of cancer in different patients had different mutations. 
• The same cancer in the same patient had different mutations in the primary tumor compared to metastatic cancer. 
• The same cancer in the same patient had different mutations in different mutations at different sites of metastasis. 
• The same cancer in the same patients in the same tumor mass had different mutations. 

Cancer was a baffling mishmash of genetic peculiarities that had almost no connection to one another. Genetic mutations were everywhere and nowhere. Some cancers had hundreds of mutations, and others had none at all. The rate of mutations necessary to develop a cancer is much higher than the known rate of mutation in human cells. Normal cells just don't mutate anywhere close to the rate needed to produce cancer. Finally, the genetic mutations were a proximate, rather than a root, cause of cancer. 

Genetic mutations may explain the mechanism of how cancers keep growing, but they do not explain the fundamental question of why these genes mutated. The SMT fails because it is entirely inward-looking, towards our genes, instead of outward-looking, toward the environment. The seed is important, but the soil matters most. 

Cancer is older than humanity

The oncogenes and the tumor suppressor genes discovered so laboriously over the last quarter-century are mutations of normal genes. Every single cell in our body contains the seed of cancer. Why?

Dogs get cancer. Cats get cancer. Rats get cancer. Even the most primitive multicellular organisms develop cancer. In 2014, cancer was discovered in two species of hydra. You may recall from high school biology class that hydra are simple, small aquatic organisms that evolved very early on from single-cell organisms. 

The origins of cancer are found at the origins of all multicellular life itself. This may have seemed obvious to a cancer outsider, but not to an insider with the curse of knowledge. Cancer is very deeply embedded into the way multicellular life is done. 

Cancer is older than humanity. Searching for the answers to cancer's origin among the evolutionarily recent genes of humans is futile. The answers are simply not there. Cancer was something much older and more fundamental to life on earth than humanity. 

Single-cell organisms differ from multicellular organisms by the following four main characteristics: 

1. They grow
2. They are immortal
3. They move around
4. They use glycolysis (also called the Warburg effect)

These are precisely the characteristics of cancer!

Cancer originates from cells of a multicellular organism, but it behaves precisely as a single-cell organism. This is a spectacular and novel finding. 

The roots of cancer lie in our evolutionary past. Perhaps cancer was not a forward-looking evolutionary process, but a backward-looking one. 

Today's standard cancer treatments resemble ancient existential threats: radiation (pre-ozone layer), poison, and antimetabolites (nutritional challenges, periodic starvation). Unicellular cells are no strangers to these threats and have evolved effective responses to flourish under these precise conditions. 

We've long treated cancer as some kind of random genetic mistake. A mistake that arises in all animals throughout history and evolves independently in millions of people a year? Cancer is hardly a mistake. Cancer is the ultimate survivor. When all else dies, cancer is there because it is the core of the cell that will survive at all costs. Cancer is not random, and it is not stupid. It has developed the tools it needs to survive. 

This model fits the known facts of cancer better than any previous paradigm. Undoubtedly, this will not be the final word on cancer, and it should not be judged as such. Nor are all its suppositions proven facts. There will always be much to learn about cancer, but I believe this new paradigm is a huge and useful step forward, explaining many of cancer's mysteries. 

Nutrition & Cancer: 

Fiber - By comparative study between African (with lots of fiber) and Western diet (little fiber); cancer was not simply a disease of too little fiber, and thus, eating more fiber didn't translate into less cancer. 

Fat - By comparative study between South Pacific Islanders (with lots of fat) and Indian vegetarians (low fat); lowering dietary fat resulted in no measurable protection against cancer. 

Vitamins - When vital nutrients like beta-carotene are available in large doses, cancer cells are highly active and grow like weeds. Same with folic acid (vitamin B9), Vitamin E while Vitamin C, D, and Omega-3 oils were neutral. High-dose vitamins promote cell growth. It is really that simple. 

But diet plays a large role in cancer. 

• Obesity clearly increases the risk of cancer. Obesity also clearly increases the risk of type 2 diabetics. The link - insulin. 
• Avoid - Sugar and refined grains which leads to hyperinsulinemia. 
• Insulin is an important nutrient sensor, signaling the presence of food, but what does that have to do with cancer? Everything! The nutrient sensor insulin is also a highly potent growth factor. 
• Each increase in ten centimeters in height is associated with a 16 percent increase in the risk of cancer. Growth factors increase height. Growth factors also increase cancer risk. 
• The most widely studied natural food for cancer chemoprevention (term used to denote foods, supplements, or drugs that may block progression of cancer) is green tea, which contains high levels of catechins. 

Growth - The common thread that runs through all conditions of increased weight, increased weight, increased eyeball length (myopia), and cancer is that they are all conditions of excessive growth. We often think growth is good, but the truth is that in adults, growth is not necessary or even good. Quite the contrary, growth is bad, sometimes very bad. 

Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) - This was an astonishing revelation for biologists - the equivalent of discovering a new continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Hundreds of years of medical science had somehow missed this fundamental nutrient-sensing pathway that was so essential to life on earth that it had been conserved in animals from yeast all the way to humans. In an evolutionary sense, mTOR is older even than the much better-known sensor insulin. The mTOR pathway is found in virtually all life-forms, rather than just mammals, so the name was changed to a mechanistic target of rapamycin, but it retained its catchy moniker "mTOR". 

AMPK - The nutrient sensors insulin and mTOR respond mainly to dietary intake of carbohydrates and proteins. The nutrient sensor AMPK, however, assesses the overall available cellular energy. 

• Lots of energy stored = low AMPK
• LIttle energy stored = high AMPK
• High AMPK lowers mTOR activity, slowing growth down. AMPK increases the production of new mitochondria, the energy makers in cells, to increase the cell's capacity for burning fat. AMPK also increases autophagy, the important cellular self-cleansing, and the recycling process. 
• Foods and drugs that activate AMPK - Diabetes drug metformin; resveratrol from grapes and red wine; epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) from green tea and chocolate; capsaicin from peppers; turmeric, garlic, and the traditional Chinese medical herb berberine. Calorie restriction also activates AMPK. 

Autophagy - The word autophagy derives from the Greek word auto, meaning "self" and phagein, meaning "to eat", so it literally means "eating oneself". Autophagy is a regulated, orderly process of degrading cellular components to be recycled into new ones. Autophagy functions as a cellular housekeeper, when mTOR is high, putting the cell into growth mode, so autophagy and mitophagy (the process of removing old and damaged mitochondria) turn off. 

• Nutrient deprivation, especially protein deprivation lowers mTOR and activates autophagy. 

Metastasis:

Cancer cells break off the primary tumor to find more room to grow. This happens early in cancer's course, as the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) consume nutrients rapidly and are very quickly driven by the increased competition for resources. This new environmental stress creates new evolutionary selection pressures. 

Unfortunately, these CTCs find out that the bloodstream is a terribly hostile environment, and most just die. One day, a rare genetic mutant arises that is able to survive both the immune cell attack and the travel through the bloodstream long enough to circulate back to the original tumor site. 

As it returns home, it finds a sanctuary against all the scary things trying to kill it, and it recovers. The tumor has just self-seeded. But this returning cancer is more aggressive and just a tiny bit better able to survive in the bloodstream. This more aggressive variant multiplies within the safety of the primary tumor site. It dominates and outcompetes the incumbent cancer cells. This cycle of tumor self-seeding and metastasis repeats over and over, with cancer continually evolving over time its ability to survive the bloodstream. 

Eventually, a rare genetic mutation allows the cancer cells to reach the new distant shore of the other organs and manage to survive. They might not thrive, but at least they're not dead. This micrometastasis is so small that it is undetectable and may lie dormant for decades. Invasion and metastasis are difficult to skills to master, and most cancers fail. 

Given enough time, Darwinian evolutionary processes select a rare genetic variant to flourish, and the little outpost of metastatic cancer cells grows. Cancer has just become metastatic. This slow process from initial carcinogenesis to metastasis takes decades. 

New Dawn:

The evolutionary/ecologic paradigm recognizes the importance of cell-to-cell interactions and interactions with the environment, making it a far more dynamic, inclusive, and comprehensive theory of cancer. Evolutionary biology links carcinogenesis, progression, and metastasis, whereas genetics considers them all as separate issues. 

This idea is not new; it just needed to be rediscovered. "Cancer is no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars," wrote cancer researcher D.W. Smithers in 1962. A traffic jam results from the interaction between the car, neighboring cars, and the environment. If you look only at each individual car - Are the brakes working? Was it recently serviced? - you will fail to find the problem. 

Similarly, cancer is not only a genetic disease but also an ecological disease. The environment plays a huge role in determining whether cancer grows. Under certain conditions, such as high insulin levels, cancer will thrive, while under other conditions, it will fail to establish itself. 

Treatments:

Screening

Simply catching more early-stage diseases is not useful by itself. In breast and colorectal cancer, screening reduced late-stage disease but in prostate, esophageal, and pancreatic cancer it has not, and that makes all the difference in the world. 

Many of the early-stage breast cancers are unlikely to ever progress to a dangerous state - as the evolutionary model explains, cancer can be fully contained by the body's own anti-cancer mechanisms. Aggressive treatment of early cancers is simply unnecessary. With toxic treatments such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, the treatment may be worse than the disease. 

Finding and treating cancers that don't need to be treated is not a useful strategy. 

Without good evidence of the benefits of screening, and a better understanding of why it may fail, we must rely on the ancient medical guiding principle of Primum non-nocere, which means, "First, do no harm." 

Dietary Determinants

Autopsy studies find unsuspected prostate cancer in 30 percent of men over the age of fifty, 50 percent by age seventy, and an astounding 80 percent by age ninety. Because the seed of cancer is ever-present in all our cells, an important question is: why don't you get cancer? If it is not a seed problem, then it may be a soil problem. Diet is a hugely important determinant of progression because nutrient availability is inextricably linked to cell growth, particularly for cancer cells. For the most part, dietary prevention of cancer boils down to one key strategy: avoiding diseases of hyperinsulinemia, including obesity and type-2 diabetes.   

Ketones

When fat is metabolized for energy, molecules called ketone bodies are produced, which cancer cells have difficulty using. By simulating the breakdown of muscle protein, amino acids are delivered to the liver and converted to glucose, which cancer cells love. So, while weight loss may be a useful strategy to prevent the progression of cancer, cancer cachexia (a phenomenon of unintentional weight loss in patients with advanced disease), once advanced, limits the effect of diet on cancer treatment. Reducing glucose in an attempt to "starve" cancer is only modestly hopeful because advanced cancer can break down other tissues to free the glucose it needs. Dietary therapy must likely be combined with other treatments to be effective at this stage.

Fasting & Cancer:

• Intermittent fasting is a promising nutritional approach for cancer prevention, as it protects against many risk factors such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and inflammation. 
• Fasting simultaneously reduces all human nutrient sensors, most of the growth pathways, and also increases autophagy and mitoghagy. 
• Fasting during chemotherapy may also reduce the side effects of treatment while increasing efficacy. Fasting protects the normal cells by putting them into a quiescent state, or maintenance mode, which may help mitigate chemotherapy side effects of hair loss and nausea. Cancer cells do not enjoy this protective state because their genetic programming puts them into continuous growth mode. 

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy has several inherent advantages over conventional treatments. 

• The boosted immune system is a dynamic system that can better keep pace with cancer's moves. The immune system can adjust and evolve alongside the cancer. 
• Immune system has a memory, so it may prevent recurrence. 
• Immunotherapy has fewer side effects than standard chemotherapies because the immune system is a targeted treatment. 
• Immunotherapy is a systemic treatment, which is crucial because cancer is a systemic disease. Metastasis occurs early in the disease process, so a systemic therapy can treat potential micrometastases throughout the body. The immune system can lock on and destroy cancer cells and does not need to be manually targeted in the same way as local treatments like surgery and radiation. The systemic nature of treatment also means that immunotherapy may be effective even very late in the disease process, after the cancer has metastasized. 

What I've Been Reading

Then, like a man who during a long illness suddenly appears to recover for a moment and glow with renewed hope, Zweig carried Montaigne up from the cellar, and without delay set out to tell the world why this incomparable man of letters, four centuries dead, mattered now in moral terms and how in an intolerable period of history. Montaigne showed better than anyone else that one could remain free.  

[---]

Crucially, it was Montaigne who "assisted" Zweig's suicide, particularly through the essay "A Custom of the Isle of Cea", whose principal theme is the question of willed death, the idea that it is more noble for a man of ideals to depart voluntarily when life becomes unbearable than to remain alive at all costs. 

The most just death is that which is most willed. Our lives depend on the will of others, but death on ourselves alone. There is nothing to which we should apply ourselves more than this. Reputation has no place here and it is folly to think of it. Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die. 

Montaigne by Stephan Zweig. 

I am writing this in 2021 - There is no human I admire more than this five hundred century-old Montaigne.  Not only admire him but I consider him as my closest friend. My teacher. A guide. An inspiration. 

I have written a lot on this blog on the importance of changing one's mind. No human did that better than Montaigne:

Like a river, all flows over him, leaving nothing behind: no deep conviction, no solid opinion, nothing fixed, nothing stable. 

This weakness, which Montaigne endlessly bemoans, is in fact his strength. An inability to remain fixed at a certain point allows him always to go further. With him, nothing is ever set in stone. He never stops at the boundary of past experiences; he does not rest on his empiricism; he amasses no capital; before properly consuming them his spirit must acquire experiences over and again. So his life becomes an operation of perpetual renewal: "Unremittingly we begin our lives anew." The truth that he finds may in the coming months or even the coming years be truths no more. He must be forever searching. Thus is born a multitude of contradictions. Now he appears an Epicurean, now a Stoic, now a skeptic. He is at one and the same time all and nothing, always different and yet ever the same, the Montaigne of 1550, 1560, 1570, 1580, the Montaigne of yesterday. 

Stephan Zweig went through so much in life and finally, he discovered Montaigne towards the end of his life. Before he committed suicide, he wrote this book. 

Only he whose soul is in turmoil, forced to live in an epoch where war, violence, and ideological tyranny threaten the life of every individual, and the most precious substance in that life, the freedom of the soul, can know how much courage, sincerity and resolve are required to remain faithful to his inner self in these times of the herd's rampancy. Only he knows that no task on earth is more burdensome and difficult than to maintain one's intellectual and moral independence and preserve it unsullied through a mass cataclysm. Only once he has endured the necessary doubt and despair within himself can the individual play an exemplary role in standing form amidst the world's pandemonium. 

Only a seasoned man who has tested himself can appreciate the true worth of Montaigne, and I count myself one of them. 

I rest my case. If you haven't reached out to Montaigne yet (via his writings),  please do so. Life as you know will change for good. 

In his thirty-eighth year, Montaigne enters retirement. He no longer wishes to serve anyone but himself. He is weary of politics, of public life and business affairs. It is a moment of disillusionment. In his social prestige, in his position in life, he is inferior to his father. He has been a worse civil servant, worse husband a worse custodian. What exactly is he then? He has the sense that up to this moment in his life has been a sham; he yearns to live properly, to reflect deeply, and ruminate. And it is among his books he hopes to find the solution to the eternal problem of "life and death". 

For him this farewell must be more than just a farewell to duties. It is a rejection of the exterior world. Until now he has lived for others - now he wants to live for himself alone. Until now he has done what is occupation, the court, his father demanded of him, now he wants to do only what is pleasurable to the self. When he wanted to help, he achieved nothing; when he aspired to something, they barred his way; when he sought to counsel, they ignored his advice. He has amassed experience, now he wants to establish their meaning and harvest their flowering. Michel de Montaigne has lived thirty-eight years on earth; now Michel de Montaigne wants to know: "Who exactly is this Michel de Montaigne?"

Max came into my life when I was 31. Within few months, I discovered that my life until that point was pointless. Thirty-One years filled with vanity. Years filled with dancing to the tune of society. In John Gray's words, I was a Marionette. Max helped me see that before I know Montaigne. Later, when I found Montaigne - I found a friend. 

Max gave me life and taught me how to live. Montaigne, my friend from five hundred years ago who lived through unbearable barbarism taught me not to kill myself. Through this friend, I saw my life, and the times we live now are a million times better than what it used to be. If Montaigne, my friend could live through brutality and barbarism and not kill himself. Then, I can do so too. And I decided to live after Max. I decided to keep this blog alive too. For that future kid, who might be suffocating with brutality humans unleash and decide to commit suicide. I was lucky to have  Max and Montaigne; they rescued me. This blog, a little world of Max will be there after I am gone for someone if they are looking for the courage to live. 

Like Shakespeare later, he had seen with an all too clear eye the fragility of everything: "the wantonness of administrative bodies, the debasement of grace and favour, the absurdity of politics, the monotonous tedium of the courts", and above all his own ineffectualness in the world. He had tried to help, but they were indifferent to his approach, yet always with the pride and bearing of a man who knows his own worth he struggled on to counsel the great men, to pacify fanatics, though they were indifferent to him. 

[---]

He says to himself what we all say to ourselves in comparable periods of mass insanity: Never mind the world! You cannot change it, or improve anything. Focus on yourself, save in yourself what can be saved. Build as others destroy, strive to remain sane in the deluge of madness. Close yourself off. Construct your own world. 

Today while walking in the park, I saw this big tree. Max used to pee on this tree every time we walked. Part of Max is probably still alive in that tree. That tree will still be here when I am gone. That tree is a symbol of thriving under adversity, pandemonium, and all the brutality humans unleash. In few weeks, that tree will have leaves and flowers. It will help birds, insects, and zillion other microbes to thrive. And there will be Neo who will go pee there. There is beauty in that tree. There will be millions of humans who might kill it and burn it for the sheer pleasure of drinking under fire or worse, just because it reminds them of some god damn tradition. But yet, there was this dog named Max and a man who adored that tree. The tree doesn't care about them. It lives for the sheer pleasure of life and helping birds, insects, microbes, a dog named Max, and a man.  

I learnt to see the world like this through Montaigne. I wish Stephan Zweig saw what I saw in Montaigne and used Montaigne as an inspiration to live. After almost a century, I am reading Stephan Zweig and love what he wrote. I wish he lived longer, not committed suicide and wrote more books. 

Thank you Stephan Zweig for writing this book. You have touched my life. Your life wasn't lived in vain. You did have an impact on my life. Thank you.

"He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth."

What I've Been Reading

A long historical view not only helps us to keep calm to a "time of trouble" but reminds us that there is an end to the longest tunnel. Even if we can see no good hope ahead, an historical interest as to what will happen is a help in carrying on. For a thinking man, it can be the strongest check on a suicidal feeling. 

[---]

What can the individual learn from history as a guide to living? Not what to do but what to strive for. And what to avoid in striving. The importance and intrinsic value of behaving decently. The importance of seeing clearly; not least seeing himself clearly. 

[---]

He may realize that the world is a jungle. But if he has seen that it could be better for anyone if the simple principles of decency and kindliness were generally applied, then he must in honesty try to practice these consistently and to live, personally, as if they were general. In other words, he must follow the right he has seen. 

Why Don't We Learn from History? by B.H Liddell Hart (1944). 

Time for a small rant: How stupid of me for not having read this book for over 3 decades, end rant. And I don't think, I have to say anything more. 

Cost of quantifying history (and not understanding history is both science & art): 

It was the school of German historians, headed by Ranke, who in the last century started the fashion of trying to be purely scientific. Any conclusions and generalizations were shunned, and any well-written books become suspect. What was the result? History became too dull to read and devoid of meaning. It became merely a subject for study by specialists. 

So the void was filled by new myths, of exciting power but appalling consequences. The world has suffered, and Germany worst of all, for the sterilization of history that started in Germany. 

The hardest lesson to learn (caused by societal delusion): 

The most dangerous of all delusions are those that arise from the adulteration of history in the imagined interests of national and military morale. Although this lesson of experience has been the hardest earned, it remains the hardest to learn. Those who have suffered most show their eagerness to suffer more. 

This camouflaged history not only conceals faults and deficiencies that could otherwise be remedied, but engenders false confidence, and false confidence underlies most of the failures that military history records. 

On human nature: 

It was saddening to discover how many apparently honorable men would stoop to almost anything to help their own advancement. 

Loyalty is a noble quality, so long as it is not blind and does not exclude the higher loyalty to truth and decency. 

Faith vs. Truth: 

A realization of the cycle of familiar errors, endlessly recurring, which largely makes up the course of military history may lead one to think that the only hope of escape lies in more candid scrutiny of past experience and new honest in facing the facts. 

But one should still be able to appreciate the point of view of those who fear the consequences. Faith matters so much in times of crisis. One must have gone deep into history before reaching the conviction that truth matters more. 

We are blind to our own blindness: 

All of us do foolish things, but the wiser realize what they do. The most dangerous error is the failure to recognize our own tendency to error. That failure is a common affliction of authority. 

Understanding the restraints of democracy: 

We learn from history that democracy has commonly put a premium on conventionality. By its nature, it prefers those who keep step with the slowest march of thought and frowns on those who may disturb the "conspiracy for mutual inefficiency". Thereby, this system of government tends to result in the triumph of mediocrity and entails the exclusion of first-rate ability if it is combined with honesty. But the alternative to it, despotism, almost inevitably means the triumph of stupidity. And of the two evils, the former is less. 

Anyone who urges a different system, for efficiency's sake, is betraying the vital tradition. 

(Note: A lot of "intelligent" people voted for a narcissist Trump deluding themselves with imagined efficiency and unfortunately, it is still happening in India with no end in sight. Now, please go back and read the title of this book.) 

On Napolean & Hitler: 

To the unromantic historian, Napolean is more of a knave than a hero. But to the philosopher, he is even more of a fool than a knave. His folly was shown in the ambition he conceived and the goal he pursued, while this frustration was ensured by his capacity to fool himself. Yet the reflection remains that such a fool and his devasting folly was largely the creation of smaller, if better, fools. So great is the fascination of romantic folly!

Almost exactly 129 years after Napolean launched his invasion is Russia, Hitler began his attack on Russia, on June 22, 1941. Despite the revolutionary changes which had taken place in the interval he was to provide a tragic demonstration of the truth that mankind, and least of all its "great men," do not learn from history. 

The secret of lasting reforms: 

Reforms that last are those that come naturally, and with less friction, when men's minds have become ripe of them. A life spent in sowing a few grains of fruitful thought is a life spent more effectively than in hasty action that produces a crop of weeds. That leads us to see the difference, truly a vital difference, between influence and power. 

On the myth of "great man" (god delusion): 

History shows that the main hindrance to real progress is the ever-popular myth of the 'great man'. While 'greatness' may perhaps be used in a comparative sense, if even then referring more to particular qualities than to the embodied sum, the 'great man' is a clay idol whose pedestal has been built up by the natural human desire to look up to someone, but whose form has been carved by men who have not yet outgrown the desire to be regarded or to picture themselves, as great men. Many of those who gain power under power present systems have much that is good in them. Few are without some good in them. But to keep the lowest common denominator of the people, to instinct rather than to reason, to interest rather than to right, to expediency rather than to principle. It sounds practical and may thus command respect where to speak of ideals might only arouse distrust. But in practice, there is nothing more difficult than to discover where expediency lies, it is apt to lead from one expedient to another, in a vicious circle through endless knots. 

The ultimate dream (and mine too): 

How differently the affairs of the world would go, with a little more decency, a little more honesty, a little more thought! Thought-attempting, above all, to see a few moves ahead and realize the dangers of condoning evil. We try to play the old diplomatic game, yet cannot hope to play it successfully, because we have acquired scruples from which the old-style exponent of realpolitik is free, not yet having grown up as far. 

(Note: "decent" men who never use foul language in public nor private, mindlessly voted for the dangerous man Trump who used the word "pussy" in public gatherings. Now, please go back and read the title of this book.)

The germs of war: 

Sympathies and antipathies, interests and loyalties, cloud the vision. And this kind of short-sight is apt to produce short temper. 

As a light on the processes by which wars are manufactured and detonated, there is nothing more illuminating than a study of the fifty years of history preceding 1914. The vital influences are to detected not in the formal documents compiled by rulers, ministers, and generals but in their marginal notes and verbal asides. Here are revealed their instinctive prejudices, lack of interest in truth for its own sake, and indifference to the exactness of the statement and reception which is a safeguard against dangerous misunderstanding. 

I have come to think that accuracy, in the deepest sense is the basic virtue, the foundation of understanding, supporting the promise of progress. 

Sweeping judgments, malicious gossip, inaccurate statements which spread a misleading impression; these are symptoms of the moral and mental recklessness that gives rise to war. Studying their effect, one is lead to see that the germs of war lie within ourselves, not in economics, politics, or religion as such. How can we hope to rid the world of war until we have cured ourselves of the originating causes?

(Note: once again, men of "character" without a hint of irony nor awareness of their dissonance voted for a narcissist Trump. Now, please go back and read the title of this book.)

How the germs work: 

While economic factors formed a predisposing cause, the deeper and more decisive factors lay in human nature, its possessiveness, competitiveness vanity, and pugnacity, all of which were fomented by the dishonestly which breeds inaccuracy. 

Both of those governments, and their foreign ministers, in particular, were all ready to bring misery upon millions rather than swallow their injured pride. 

Plan for peace: 

Any plan for peace is apt to be not only futile but dangerous. Like most planning, unless of a mainly material kind, it breaks down through disregard of human nature. Worse still, the higher the hopes that are built on such a plan, the more likely that their collapse may precipitate war. 

There is no panacea for peace that can be written out in a formula like a doctor's prescription. But one can set down a series of practical points; elementary principles drawn from the sum of human experience in all times. Study war and learn from its history. Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil; nothing is so self-blinding. Cure yourself of two commonly fatal delusions: the idea of victory and the idea that war cannot be limited. 

How did our civilization has survived so far?: 

An important influence was the growth of more formal and courteous manners in social life. This code of manners spread into the field of international relations. These two factors, reason and manners, saved civilization when it was on the verge of collapse. Men came to feel that behavior mattered more than belief, and customs more than creeds, in making earthly life tolerable and human relations workable. 

(Note: Belief in an imaginary economy mattered for 70 plus million US citizens than behavior and customs and ended up voting for a narcissist Trump).

War is a means to an end (Difference between Napolean and Wellington): 

It was because he really understood war that he became so good at securing peace. He was the least militaristic of soldiers and free from the lust of glory. It was because he saw the value of peace that he became so unbeatable in war. For he kept the end in view, instead of falling in love with the means. Unlike Napolean, he was not infected by the romance of war, which generates illusions and self-deception. That was how Napolean had failed and Wellington prevailed. 

If you wish for peace, understand war. If there is one lesson that should be clear from history it is that bad means deform the end, or deflect its course thither. I would suggest the corollary that, if we take care of the means, the end will take care of itself. 

History and Christianity (how to limit and eliminate idealogy): 

The oldest gospel manuscripts belong to the fourth century A.D. They are copies of copies so that there was an immensely long interval during which copyists might alter the original text to fit the religious ideas of their own generation. Biblical scholars have to base themselves on nothing more definite than a tradition in ascribing the origin of the earliest written gospels to the second half of the first century A.D. If they are correct in their deduction, which is really speculation, there is still no means of telling how much they were altered by editing in the course of three hundred years; a period that abounded in controversy and schisms in the Chruch. 

We are given minds to use, and there can be no better use for them than religious thinking. But we should humbly recognize there may be different paths and feel in sympathy with all other travelers. The difficulties that arise in religious doctrine and history too often drive thoughtful people into a state of no belief. But for my own part, I have found that the difficulties tend to disappear if one remembers that such doctrine and history was complied by human interpreters, humanly liable to mistakes. 

On Confucianism (and Buddism): 

Confucianism was humanly wiser. It recognized, and applied, better than Christianity the truth of experience that was epitomized in Aristotle's observation that "Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way."  At the same time, the Chinese themselves seem to have found that Confucianism "was not enough." Hence the appeal of Buddhism and Taoism there, often in combination with Confucianism. They provided a more spiritual element that mankind wanted. 

Towards the middle of the book, Liddell Hart wrote these beautiful lines to given a simple heuristic on what might work. It felt as though he was talking about how Max and I lived for 13 years (I continue to do so with him inside me). It made me smile and think at least we were and are on the right path... 

The race of power and personal positions seems to destroy all men's characters. I believe that the only creature who can keep his honour is a man living on his own estate; he has no need to intrigue and struggle, for it is no good intriguing for fine weather. 

This is an amazing book and should be treasured for life. Please read and re-read it for the rest of your life. 

Our deeper hope from experience is that it should make us, not shrewder (for next time), but wiser (forever). History teaches us personal philosophy. 

- Jacob Burckhardt

Once we get a meta-level understanding of history, we should turn to the present and salute the people who make this civilization tick. One of them is Alexey Navalny. Let's cheer and support his audacity. 

What I've Been Reading

A man who understands the weather only terms of golf is participating in a public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering. I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal. 

[---]

What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. 

[---]

The change of mind I am talking about involves not just a change of knowledge, but also a change of attitude toward our essential ignorance, a change in our bearing in face of mystery. The principles of ecology, if we will take them to heart, should keep us aware that our lives depend upon other lives and upon an interlocking system that, though we can destroy it, we can neither fully understand nor fully control. And our great dangerousness is that, locked in our selfish and myopic economy, we have been willing to change or destroy, we have been willing to change or destroy far beyond our power to understand. We are not humble enough or reverent enough. 

Think Little: Essays by Wendel Berry.

I love Wendel Berry. He is one of those rare humans who focuses only on personal responsibilities and took upon the impossible task of raising awareness that only personal responsibilities can reduce suffering on this planet. 

This little gem of a book was published in 1972. The book begins with a bigger picture of how we sapiens delude ourselves as makers of nature but he slowly exposes our delusions using his personal experience at his home town, a small town in Kentucky. The point is each one of us can rise to his level of awareness by being conscious of nature around our own home.

Within the first few months after Max came into my life, this place,  a house became home. Thankfully, I understood that this is the place Max will live and we will make memories. 

Max left me with tons and tons of memories in this place we called home. I will live here for the rest of my life and perish here in the same place as Max did. In the 1960s Wendel Berry went through a similar transformation and left the epic center of the literary world and returned back to his small Kentucky town. 

I was to realize during the next few years how false and destructive and silly those ideas are. But even then I was aware that life outside the literary world was not without honorable precedent; if there was Wolfe, there was also Faulkner; if there was James, there was also Thoreau. But I had in my mind that made the greatest difference was the knowledge of the few square miles in Kentucky that were mine by inheritance and by birth and by the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in. 

What finally freed me from these doubts and suspicions was the insistence in what was happening to me that, far frin being bored and diminished and obscured to myself by my life here. I had grown more alive and more conscious than I had ever been.  

What a beautiful sentence! 

"And by the intimacy, the mind makes with the place it awakens in."

I am no Wendel Berry. My small body and mind awakened in whatever little ways by Max in this little place called home. Max showed me the beautify and wonder of this universe within the confines of our home. I will continue to experience this intimacy until my last breath. 

Wendel Berry received national humanities award in 2010 from President Obama.

What I've Been Reading

Science, the discipline in which we should find the harshest skepticism, the most pin-sharp rationality, and the hardest-headed empiricism, has become home to a dizzying array of incompetence, delusion, lies, and self-deception.

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That moral case - that making errors in science is much more than just an academic matter, because of the harm it can cause - applies similarly to fields of research that directly sacrifice lives. I'm referring, of course, to research on non-human animals, where the subjects are often 'euthanized' - that is killed - as part of the experiment (for example, to examine their brains after a new drug has been administered). This kind of research is usually strictly regulated by government agencies since virtually everyone agrees it would be immoral to kill lab animals, or even just to cause them to suffice, for no good scientific reason. So animal studies don't just carry the usual of trying to produce accurate, replicable results without wasting resources. They also have an additional responsibility: ensuring that errors in their design and analysis don't render pointless pain and death that they inevitably cause. Unfortunately, a considerable proportion - by some measures, a majority - of animal research studies fail this test. 

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie. 

There is a common misconception that religion, socialism et al., are the only sources that unleash the pain, destruction, and death. No question they caused and still causing immense pain, destruction, and death but we conveniently forget the only common factor amongst these is humans. Science is no exception; last time I checked scientists are humans. 

Unless, we as a society at a meta-level change the incentives from money and fame to morality - this is not going to change. 

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

- Henry G. Bohn, A Hand-Book of Proverbs

Ultra-Hyped Fields:

Stem cells, genetics, epigenetics, machine learning, and brain imagining; for the past few years, a strong contender for the 'most hyped' award has been research on the microbiome - the countless millions of microbes that inhabit our bodies. 

Perverse Incentives:

Because studies reporting positive, flashy, novel, newsworthy results are rewarded so much more than others, scientists are incentivized to generate them to the detriment of everything else. To convenience the reviewers and editors that their papers really do have all those qualities, too many of them end up bending or breaking the rules (of Mertonian norms of universalism, commonality, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism). 

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The system incentives scientists not to practice science, but simply to meet its own perverse demands. The incentives are at the root of so many of the dubious practices that undermine our research. 

Fixing Science:(addresses symptoms but not causes - which is basic human nature)

Some of the proposed solutions for the corresponding issues:

Fake data and negligence: Algorithms (services such as GRIM and Statcheck) do and could help with these issues. 

Novelty Bias: Journals should also publish null results and journals making the authors responsible for publishing further work checking whether it replicates. 

Statistical bias and p-hacking: Cannot remove them completely since its scary to move towards a subjective metric (current issue with nutrition studies), use more of the Bayesian approach (although the prior is subjective), and other metrics such as multi-verse analysis (if we imagine infinite parallel universes, in each of which you ran the analysis slightly differently, in what proportion of them would you find the complete opposite? Would all these analyses converge to the same overall result?)

Preprints and Pre-registration take out a lot of issues. Registering a study involves positing a public, time-stamped document online that details what the researchers are planning to do, in advance of collecting any data. It allows us to see the hypothesis the researchers intended to test, so we can check if any of them were switched mid-study. This is all about transparency. 

Replication crisis: Team Science - Large Collaborative Projects such as 'Plan S', and Open Access with funding from government and major funders, help force changes in research practice. These large-scale projects can directly address the applicability of their respective fields and because the results are being shared around a larger community of usually very opinionated scientists, they can also, in theory, act as a check on the biases of any individual scientist. 

Just as publishing more null results and replication studies is a more dependable way to build our knowledge, becoming more aware of the uncertain and preliminary nature of research is, in the long run, a better way to appreciate science fully. Let's work to resist our neophiliac, magpie-like focus on shiny research findings, and instead learn to value results that are solid, even if they're less immediately thrilling. In other words, let's Make Science Boring Again. 

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Treating each study as a tentative step towards an answer, rather than as the answer itself.

What I've Been Reading

Complexity science does study something distinctive - namely the emergent features of systems that are composed of a lot of components that interact repeatedly in a disordered way. The reason why it has been hard to identify what is distinctive about complex systems is that there are many different kinds of emergent properties and products of complex systems, and they are not all found in all complex systems. The common features of complex systems manifest themselves differently in different kinds of systems. 

What is a Complex System? by James Ladyman and Karoline Wiesner. 

This is one of the most important books you will read in your life. Developing even a rudimentary understanding of the complexity and complex systems will make one look at life differently (for good) plus it will help develop a sense of humility and gratitude for what we have without believing in magic and conspiracies. 

The complex system helps in understanding things such as how animals sufferings in factory farms will lead to a pandemic that could wipe out our species. 

Ladyman and Karoline attempt to "unpack" complex systems by avoiding biases put forth by existing researchers and keeping it open-ended as humanely as possible. They have also kept math and technical details to the minimum.  

They have done an enormous favor to a common reader by defining some of the salient features of the complex systems (not all always applies to all complex systems):

1. Numerosity: complex systems involve many interactions among many components. 
2. Disorder and diversity: the interactions in a complex system are not coordinated or controlled centrally, and the components may differ. 
3. Feedback: the interactions in complex systems are iterated so that there is feedback from previous interactions on a time scale relevant to the system's emergent dynamics. 
4. Non-equilibrium: complex systems are open to the environment and are often driven by something external. 
5. Spontaneous order and self-organization: complex systems exhibit structure and order that arises out of the interactions among their parts. 
6. Nonlinearity: complex systems exhibit nonlinear dependence on parameters or external drivers. 
7. Robustness: the structure and function of complex systems is stable under relevant perturbations. 
8. Nested structure and modularity: there may be multiple scales of structure, clustering, and specialization of function in complex systems. 
9. History and memory: complex systems often require a very long history to exist and often store information about history. 
10. Adaptive behavior: complex systems are often able to modify their behavior depending on the state of the environment and the predictions they make about it.

We argue that a system is complex if it has some or all of spontaneous order and self-organization, non-linear behavior, robustness history and memory, nested structure and modularity, and adaptive behavior. These features arise from the combination of the properties of numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium. We argue that there are different kinds of complex systems because some systems exhibit some but not all of the features. 

Chaos is not always complexity:

Complexity is often linked with chaos, and it may be conflated with it, but the behavior of a chaotic system is indistinguishable from random behavior. It is true that there are systems that exhibit complexity partly in virtue of being chaotic, but their complexity is something over and above their chaotic nature. Furthermore, since chaotic behavior is a special feature of some deterministic systems, any dynamical system that is stochastic is by definition not chaotic, and yet complexity scientists study many such systems. 

Measuring Complexity:

Ideas such as "logical depth" measure not complexity but order. Complexity is a multifaceted phenomenon and that complex systems have a variety of features not all of which are found in all of them. This implies that assigning a single number to complexity cannot do justice. 

A variety of different measures would be required to capture all our intuitive ideas about what is meant by complexity. 

- Physicist Murray Gell-Mann

In summary: 

There are many important theoretical questions on which complexity science bears, the most obvious ones concerned with relationships between life and nonliving matter, and between conscious and non-conscious matter. The general implication of our analysis for these matters is that the dichotomy between atoms and molecules and advanced life forms is a very crude way of seeing the many layers of structure that are found at different scales.  The only way to understand the emergence of life is by studying the processes that occur in self-organizing physical systems not just physical structures. 

Once the complexity of nonliving systems, such as the solar system and the Earth and its climate, is grasped in detail, the difference between life and non-life seems to be less of a mysterious leap and more of a continuum. 

When we think about complex systems in the right way, we can abstract from some of their features and understand the simplicity that underlies the wonderful complexity!