On Omnipresent Pessimism

More excerpt from the book, The Rational Optimist:

"A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphant song of the kind I have vented in this book so far. If you say the world has been getting better you may get away with being called naive and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad.

If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Noble Peace Prize. The airwaves are crammed with doom.

I cannot recall a time when one or other of these scares was not solemnly espoused by sober, distinguished and serious elites and hysterically echoed by the media. I cannot recall a time when I was not being urged by somebody that the world could only survive if it abandoned the foolish goal of economic growth."

I, Pencil

A Timeless classic libertarian essay I, Pencil by Leonard Read is not only relevant in economics but I think it applies to cognitive psychology as well. We are creatures (thanks to cognitive fluency) thriving under the illusion of "knowing-it-all". Media, confirmation bias, polarization and that damn cognitive dissonance makes the illusion more surreal. It's hard to come out this self-induced quagmire unless and until we begin to realize economics behind the making of the good old pencil. And I am sure, humility will engulf automatically as a "fringe-benefit" of this realization:

"I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies— millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that
only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree."

Quote of the Day

“Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together – surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.”
–Carl Sagan

Sick (me too!!)

'I cannot go to school today, '
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
'I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I've counted sixteen chicken pox
And there's one more-that's seventeen,
And don't you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut-my eyes are blue-
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I'm sure that my left leg is broke-
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button's caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained,
My 'pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is-what?
What's that? What's that you say?
You say today is...Saturday?
G'bye, I'm going out to play! '
-Shel Silverstein

You are what you eat

Ed Young has yet another great post, follow up to his last year Quaker Daily prizing winning post. Now that science has pretty much quantified the common sense,  how many of us are willing to change our lifestyle? When will the (junk) food subsidies be downsized (or as they say in an utopian world "eradicated")? Your guess is as good as mine.

We depend on a special organ to digest the food we eat and you won’t find it in any anatomy textbook. It’s the ‘microbiome’ – a set of trillions of bacteria living inside your intestines that outnumber your own cells by ten to one. We depend on them. They wield genes that allow them to break down molecules in our food that we can’t digest ourselves. And we’re starting to realise that this secret society within our bowels has a membership roster that changes depending on what we eat.

These changes take place across both space and time. Different cultures around the world have starkly contrasting diets and their gut bacteria are different too. As we grow older, we eat increasingly diverse foods, from the milk of infancy to the complex menus of adulthood. As our palate changes, so do our gut bacteria.

Carlotta de Filippo compared the gut bacteria of 14 children from a village in Burkina Faso with those of 14 children in Florence, Italy. The African children came from families of subsistence farmers and their menus were mostly vegetarian. The eat little in the way of fat or animal protein and their diet is heavy in fibre, starch and plant carbohydrates. By contrast, the Italian kids ate a typical Western diet, high in animal protein, sugar, starch and fat and low in fibre. They ate about half as much fibre as their African peers and about 50% more calories.

These differences are reflected in their bowels. The bacterial community in the African guts were dominated by those plant-digesting specialists, the Bacteroidetes. They probably helped the children to break down the tough fibres that they eat and extract more energy from their meals. Meanwhile, the Italian bowels were dominated by another group, the Firmicutes, which are generally more common in obese people compared to lean ones.

The African children also had a greater diversity of gut bacteria, which probably hitch a ride into their bodies via their food. In Europe, generic, uncontaminated food presents a blockade to bacteria from the outside world, which means that Western gut communities have become gentrified. They lack genetic diversity, and they have few ways of increasing it.

This is bad news, for bacteria from the outside world provide a reservoir of useful genes that could help the microbiome to adapt to unusual diets. The fibre-digesting abilities of the Burkina Faso children are probably one example of this. A more striking one was discovered just last year: Japanese gut bacteria have borrowed genes from an oceanic species, which allow them to digest carbohydrates in seaweed. Western diets hold back this evolutionary potential.
But De Filippo thinks that the problems are bigger. An unbalanced or simplified microbiome could be damaging the health of Westerners more directly, affecting the risk of a variety of other medical conditions, including allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, bowel cancer and obesity. A diverse microbiome could also prevent more harmful species from setting up shop – indeed, and somewhat unexpectedly, food poisoning bacteria like Shigella and Escherichia were less common in the Burkinabe children than the Dutch ones.

Us + Wolves + L = Dogs; Us + Dogs = Civilization?

Upcoming NGC documentary And Man Created Dog is no abstraction. Thanks to Siberian Farm-fox studies we know this is true.

Early this year, BBC documentary Secret Life of Dog hypothesized human civilization might not happened without dogs.

The second part of the equation is abstract and it cannot be quantified anytime soon (or can we?). May be somethings in life are best left to speculate. I think, there is a sense of wonder and beauty in that mystery.

And Man Created Dog

This Sunday, August 8th 2010 on National Geographic Channel:

"If humans were as varied as dogs we would range in height up to 22 feet tall and in weight more than 1,000 pounds. In the ultimate canine ancestral story, NGC traces the genetic journey from wolf to dog, taking viewers back 100,000 years to meet the "mother of all dogs." It's no accident that dogs evolved this way, as humans have been selectively breeding them for around 14,000 years to serve our needs as laborer, companion, hunter, herder and warrior, as well as to suit our aesthetic fancy."

Remember the Importance of Humility - Clayton M. Christensen

"I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves."
- How Will You Measure Your Life?

Stream of Life

"The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day 
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment."

-Rabindranath Tagore

Science of Morality - Jonathan Haidt

Reading on morality research had a paradoxical effect on me. Synthesis, understanding, sympathy has replaced polarization, frustration and disdain. All that useless polemicizing, ad hominem et al is now mostly out. So far it has had a very serene effect and made me immensely calmer. No wonder, I am still in awe of Haiti's and others morality research.
Another fascinating talk on Edge by Jonathan Haidt:

"1. I was recently at a conference on moral development, and a prominent Kohlbergian moral psychologist stood up and said, "Moral psychology is dying."  And I thought, well, maybe in your neighborhood property values are plummeting, but in the rest of the city, we are going through a renaissance. We are in a golden age.
My own neighborhood is the social psychology neighborhood, and it's gotten really, really fun, because all these really great ethnic groups are moving in next door. Within a few blocks, I can find cognitive neuroscientists and primatologists, developmental psychologists, experimental philosophers and economists. We are in a golden age. We are living through the new synthesis in ethics that E.O. Wilson called for in 1975. We are living through an age of consilience.

2.Moral psychology is a descriptive enterprise, not a normative one. We have WEIRD chemistry. The chemistry produced by Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies is our chemistry, and it's a very good chemistry. And we have every reason to believe it's correct. And if a Ayurvedic practitioner from India were to come to a chemistry conference and say, "Good sirs and madams, your chemistry has ignored our Indian, you know, our 5,000-year-old chemistry," the chemists might laugh at them, if they were not particularly polite, and say, "Yeah, that's right. You know, we really don't care about your chemistry."
But suppose that same guy were to come to this conference and say, "You know, your moral psychology has ignored my morality, my moral psychology."  Could we say the same thing?  Could we just blow him off and say, "Yeah, we really don't care"?  I don't think that we could do that. And what if the critique was made by an American Evangelical Christian, or by an American conservative?  Could we simply say, "We just don't care about your morality"?  I don't think that we could.

3.Morality is like The Matrix, from the movie "The Matrix."  Morality is a consensual hallucination, and when you read the WEIRD people article, it's like taking the red pill. You see, oh my God, I am in one particular matrix. But there are lots and lots of other matrices out there.
We happen to live in a matrix that places extraordinary value on reason and logic. So, the question arises, is our faith justified?  Maybe ours is right and the others are wrong. What if reasoning really is the royal road to truth?  If so, then maybe the situation is like chemistry after all. Maybe WEIRD morality, with this emphasis on individual rights and welfare, maybe it's right, because we are the better reasoners. We had The Enlightenment. We are the heirs of The Enlightenment. Everyone else is sitting in darkness, giving credence to religion, superstition and tradition. So maybe our matrix is the right one.

4.Why is reasoning so biased and motivated whenever self-interest or self-presentation are at stake?  Wouldn't it be adaptive to know the truth in social situations, before you then try to manipulate?
The answer, according to Mercier and Sperber, is that reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, and it's here on your handout, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.

5. Hume was a pluralist, because he was to some degree a virtue ethicist. Virtue ethics is the main alternative to deontology and utilitarianism in philosophy. Virtues are social skills. Virtues are character traits that a person needs in order to live a good, praiseworthy, or admirable life. The virtues of a rural farming culture are not the same as the virtues of an urban commercial or trading culture, nor should they be. So virtues are messy. Virtue theories are messy.
If you embrace virtue theory, you say goodbye to the dream of finding one principle, one foundation, on which you can rest all of morality. You become a pluralist, as I've listed down there. And you also become a non-parsimonist. That is, of course parsimony's always valuable in sciences, but my experience is that we've sort of elevated Occam's Razor into Occam's Chainsaw. Which is, if you can possibly cut it away and still have it stand, do it. And I think, in especially moral psychology, we've grossly disfigured our field by trying to get everything down to one if we possibly can. So I think, if you embrace virtue ethics, at least you put less of a value on parsimony than moral psychologists normally do.
But what you get in return for this messiness is, you get the payoff for being a naturalist. That is, you get a moral theory that fits with what we know about human nature elsewhere. So, I often use the metaphor that the mind is like a rider on an elephant. The rider is conscious, controlled processes, such as reasoning. The elephant is the other 99 percent of what goes on in our minds, things that are unconscious and automatic.
Virtue theories are about training the elephant. Virtue theories are about cultivating habits, not just of behavior, but of perception. So, to develop the virtue of kindness, for example, is to have a keen sensitivity to the needs of other people, to feel compassion when warranted, and then to offer the right kind of help with a full heart.