Wisdom Of The Week

"How much has cognitive science contributed to our understanding of what it is to be human, traditionally a philosophical question?

Cognitive science is in the business of settling long-running philosophical debates on human nature, innate knowledge and other issues. The fact that these theories have been churning about for a couple of millennia without any consensus is evidence that philosophical methods are better at posing questions than answering them. Philosophy tells us what is possible, and science tells us what is true.

Cognitive science has transformed philosophy. At the beginning of the 20th century, philosophers changed their methodology quite dramatically by adopting logic. There has been an equally important revolution in 21st-century philosophy in that philosophers are turning to the empirical sciences and to some extent conducting experimental work themselves to settle old questions. As a philosopher, I hardly go a week without conducting an experiment.

My whole working day has changed because of the infusion of science."

- Jesse Prinz interview on his new book Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives

David Brooks argued the same in his 2009 article - The End of Philosphy

"The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself."

Quote of the Day

"Be here now. Be some place else later. Is that so complicated?"

- David Bader

Self-fulfilling Prophecy & American Hatred For Anything Government

Francis Fukuyama has been exposing this dissonance, ever since he started blogging again. Someone had to do it but I never expected even in my wildest dreams that person would be Fukuyama. I admire and respect him even more now for adapting to changing facts (check out his new Governance Project @ Stanford).

"I would argue that the quality of governance in the US tends to be low precisely because of a continuing tradition of Jacksonian populism. Americans with their democratic roots generally do not trust elite bureaucrats to the extent that the French, Germans, British, or Japanese have in years past. This distrust leads to micromanagement by Congress through proliferating rules and complex, self-contradictory legislative mandates which make poor quality governance a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US is thus caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, in which a hobbled bureaucracy validates everyone’s view that the government can’t do anything competently. The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes."

And the his five book interview is a must read as well:

I get the sense that the belief that government is bad and markets are good is almost like a religion. No reality check is ever going to be enough to make a difference.
It is true that it is a part of the American political culture, but that culture has changed over time. People believed that very strongly in the late 19th century. Then you had the rise of the Progressive movement, which shifted views towards the need for a stronger centralised state. Then it made a big comeback in the 1920s and then the Great Depression again shifted views. It may be a religion, but it’s not a religion that members believe in at all points.

There is also this problem that both you and Jeff Sachs have written on, that if you’re constantly critical of government, and say you don’t like government, the government you get is going to be of lower quality because it gets deprived of talent and resources. This, in turn, confirms your view of government as incompetent and it becomes a vicious circle.

It’s what’s an economist would call a low-level equilibrium trap. You don’t want to pay taxes to get better government services because you’re convinced the government will waste any money that you give them. So you’re never in a position to get out of that. A lot of Latin America is basically in that situation, and I’m afraid that the US has now been in this situation for some time.

Quote of the Day

"Some People Are More Certain of Everything Than I Am of Anything."

- Robert Rubin, In An Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington

Amazon Launches Junglee.com In India

“You cannot buy directly from Junglee. Junglee puts you in touch with sellers by directing you to their websites, displaying their customer service phone numbers and providing their physical store locations to help you buy the products directly from sellers.”

It is interesting to note that, unlike Amazon.com, Junglee aims to pit the smaller e-commerce websites against each other and not sell products themselves. The idea seems to lure the players who are too small to compete against incumbents like Flipkart, InfiBeam and LetsBuy and would stand to get great link and advertising boost by signing up on Junglee.com. Currently, Junglee doesn't charge the e-commerce websites for listing. However, once the websites are hooked onto the clicks they get off Junglee, it'd be too late to back out even if Junglee starts charging a fee for all the sales, or even clicks.

- More Here

A Few Genes Control Dog's Looks

Our lifespan has almost doubled within the past century but our evolutionary partner's lifespan remains stagnant. Are we the culprit for this discrepancy? We feed them food laden with chemicals and have been tinkering their genes for centuries...

For years, scientists thought that dogs were just as genetically complicated as humans, Ratliff says. But that turned out not to be the case. Scientists at Cornell, UCLA, Stanford and the National Institutes of Health have been comparing dog DNA as part of a project called CanMap.

"They took a whole large collection of dogs, 900 dogs from, I think, 80 breeds," Ratliff says. "And what they learned was that in these dogs, if you look at their physical traits, everything from their body size to their coat color to whether they have floppy ears, it's determined by a very small number of genes."

It's actually human interference that's the cause of what Ratliff calls "Tinker-Toy genetics" in dogs. "The way that natural selection works, it usually works on very small changes," he says. Sudden large changes can actually be harmful.

But breeders can introduce large changes in a dog relatively rapidly, by selecting the genes that have the strongest effects.

"If I want a tall dog, a large dog, then I end up selecting for this gene called IGF1, which has a very very strong effect on the size of a dog. And when you do that over a couple of hundred years, what happens is ... it becomes the gene that controls body size."

Quote of the Day

"Language, is an invention, not an instinct… If language teaches us about who we are, the lesson is that we are fundamentally flexible.”

- Jesse Prinz

Internet Can Learn From Adaptive Spider Silk

A spider web provides its occupant with a home and a way to catch prey. It needs to stand up to pesky attackers and sometimes withstand hurricane-force winds. Using computer models of spider silk and experiments on the webs of common European garden spiders (Araneus diadematus), Buehler and his team found a web’s unique skills come from its ability to react differently to different stress levels.

A light wind, for instance, softens the web, allowing it to lengthen but retain its overall structure. If a larger force is applied at a specific location, such as when a particular thread is poked, the silk becomes rigid and breaks.

Furthermore, only the most extended silk threads get severed. Having small portions of the web come apart not only helps retain the overall structural integrity but actually makes the web stronger. The researchers found that removing up to a tenth of the threads at different locations allowed the structure to carry 3 to 10 percent more weight. This shows the web’s advantage over materials such as steel, which would simply break apart under such conditions.

Engineers could also apply the secrets of spider silk to other challenges, Buehler suggested. Its ability to sustain small damage without compromising the entire structure could be useful in designing virtual networks, such as the Internet, where a local node gets sacrificed during an attack to keep the whole system from going down. Understanding how its microscopic protein structure gives rise to its macroscopic properties might help in stringing together carbon nanotubes, which may one day be used to produce objects ranging from combat gear to space elevators.

- More Here

Why Are Some Cancers So Difficult To Cure?

A second idea is to chase each cancer down an evolutionary valley and into a dead end from which it cannot escape. We accept that localized traffic jams can be bypassed but, each time that happens, we identify the back route and then target that – and we keep doing it until there are no short cuts left. In practice, this would mean treating a patient with one targeted drug and, if their cancer returns with newly-developed resistance to this treatment, we then identify how that resistance evolved and hit the tumour with another drug directed at that resistance mechanism. The process is repeated until the cancer runs out of evolutionary headroom.

Both of these strategies will need a significant re-tooling and refocusing of our cancer research enterprise. We need to pay more attention to the inherent robustness and evolutionary ability of the targets against which our drugs are directed, and see if we can identify the essential engines of tumour maintenance.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

"So multifarious is existence that infinite varieties of attention are required to build a sustainable life within it. Those who particularly notice what is worrisome or anticipate — even to their detriment — what will be painful may be just those who notice nuances of life others might neglect. A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy's feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him good night. It needs people who can design air conditioners, and it needs people who can inspire joy."

- Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life