Let me try and be more precise. I don't deny that some states of human history are better than other states. Europe in 1990 was better than Europe in 1940. I don't deny that. And I don't deny that some programmes of reform have enhanced the lot of human beings to a considerable extent. And peace is better than war, freedom is better than anarchy, prosperity is better than poverty, pleasure is better than pain, beauty is better than ugliness. But there is a another very specific belief that I would guess you subscribe to: the belief that advances in ethics or politics can in principle become like advances in science in the sense of being cumulative. This is the belief that there is nothing inherent in human life or human nature to prevent cumulative improvement. We'll get to the point where there is no poverty in the world, where there is no anarchy in the world.
My view is that all gains in ethics and politics are real but they are all also reversible and all will be reversed and often reversed very easily. For example, I know many liberal humanists myself and I know that when I said two and a half years ago that torture would come back, they were incredulous. That doesn't tell me they are stupid. That tells me they are in the grip of a belief that makes such a thing unthinkable. They have a narrative, a notion of stages. But when I look at history I don't see any kind of thread, however tenuous, however sometimes broken. What I see is cyclical change, cyclical transformation.
John Gray is a realist (not a pessimist). Most folks when they read him think he presents a bleak version of past, present, and future. In other words, it is real albeit bleak and dark.
Another common complaint about John Gray is that he doesn't give us hope nor a way out of this darkness.
If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.
- Albert Einstein
To state the obvious; John is spending his entire life helping us to define the problems with human nature.
Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.
Please read on if you understand the above wisdom from John Gray.
Teleporting quantum information is big deal and researchers have successfully done it now but please don't confuse this scientific progress with moral progress. We will still continue to cause pain to animals, kill each other in wars, abuse children, and die/kill nonsensical myths.
Researchers have successfully teleported quantum information securely within the confines of a diamond – and the study has big implications for quantum information technology, the future of how sensitive information is shared and stored.
The researchers from the Yokohama National University published their results earlier this week in Communications Physics.
According to the American Physical Society’s physics page, quantum information is spy-proof. When an eavesdropper attempts to intercept a message encoded in a quantum state, the message is altered by the eavesdropper’s measurement. Quantum bits, or “Qubits”, also cannot be copied – any attempt to do so instead creates an entangled state.
“Quantum teleportation permits the transfer of quantum information into an otherwise inaccessible space,” said Hideo Kosaka, a professor of engineering at Yokohama National University and an author on the study. “It also permits the transfer of information into a quantum memory without revealing or destroying the stored quantum information.”
The “inaccessible space”, in this case, consisted of carbon atoms in diamond. Made of linked, yet individually contained, carbon atoms, a diamond holds the perfect ingredients for quantum teleportation.
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“Our ultimate goal is to realize scalable quantum repeaters for long-haul quantum communications and distributed quantum computers for large-scale quantum computation and metrology,” Kosaka added.
The National Science Foundation says that quantum effects have already been used to create unbeatable codes. Previous studies have also shown that the defects in a diamond’s atomic structure could be used to store vast amounts of data similarly to how CDs and DVDs store information on their discs.
Since one of a diamond’s atomic defects measuring just billionths of a meter wide could be used to store data, researchers say that diamonds could very well be the future of computer storage – and now with the research from Yokohama National University, they could be the future of cyber security as well.
To state the obvious; I usually do not write about politics. I am a not registered democrat nor a republican (nor a wild west libertarian). Being naturally cautious about human nature, I never trust sapiens, leave alone their groups.
What I trust are individuals who have values, passionate about always doing the right thing, understand their cosmic insignificance, and transcend beyond their self-centered life. One such person is Senator Cory Brooker of NJ. He understands animal suffering and became a vegan. He is the only person who stands and speaks for animals in the senate (with skin in the game sans virtue signaling).
In December 2019 he (and Elizabeth Warren) introduced The Farm System Reform Act of 2019 bill. This bill focuses on closing down all factory farms in the US by 2040. Here's a sample of how specific and detailed the bill is:
This paper studies the impact of social learning on the formation of close-knit communities. It provides empirical support to the hypothesis, put forth by the historian Fred Shannon in 1945, that local soil heterogeneity limited the ability of American farmers to learn from the experience of their neighbors, and that this contributed to their “traditional individualism.” Consistent with this hypothesis, I establish that historically, U.S. counties with a higher degree of soil heterogeneity displayed weaker communal ties. I provide causal evidence on the formation of this pattern in a Difference-in-Differences framework, documenting a reduction in the strength of farmers’ communal ties following migration to a soil-heterogeneous county, relative to farmers that moved to a soil-homogeneous county. Using the same design, I also show that soil heterogeneity did not affect the social ties of non-farmers. The impact of soil heterogeneity is long-lasting, still affecting culture today. These findings suggest that, while understudied, social learning is an important determinant of culture.
Another paper from a couple of years ago was how the Catholic church obsession with incest gave rise to western individualism:
Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of many Western populations. We propose that part of this variation can be traced back to the action and diffusion of the Western Church, the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church. Specifically, we propose that the Western Church’s transformation of European kinship, by promoting small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility, fostered greater individualism, less conformity, and more impersonal prosociality. By combining data on 24 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both Church exposure and kinship, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions, and among individuals from different cultural backgrounds.
James Herriot's classic books had influenced me as an adolescent and a young man which eventually culminated in Maximus and me. He has been a seminal source of inspiration for so many youngsters to choose a career path as a veterinarian.
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.
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.
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.
If you never understood some rudimentary economic principles and their "grand" problems; Dennis J. Snower's piece lays it out brilliantly.
It's a great place to understand what is microeconomics, macroeconomics, behavior economics, government regulation, and the famous invisible hand of Adam Smith.
Here are some grand problems in reality which current economic "theories" refuse to address:
If the free-market system is meant to satisfy our needs efficiently, why is it despoiling our environment?
Why is it generating inequalities and other inequities that threaten the social cohesion of our societies?
Why does it leave so many people economically insecure, vulnerable to unemployment and trapped in dead-end jobs?
Why does it not correct for the excesses of consumerism, workaholism and digital addictions, frequently leading to anxiety, depression, burnout, substance abuse and crime?
Why is it giving us so little guidance in promoting public compliance with social distancing rules during the Covid-19 pandemic, even though such compliance has economic causes and consequences?
Why does it keep so many businesses focused on short-term profit and shareholder value, even though so many business leaders are genuinely concerned about the environment and the wellbeing of their customers and employees?
My meta-level answers to the above questions are (to state the obvious - socialism is the worst virus and here we are trying to avoid capitalism becoming a virus before its too late):
Capitalism and free-market have become an ideology rather than seen as a tools-in-progress to be improved continuously to benefit life on earth,
Tribalism - "believing" and "following" other sapiens in their network by mindless habit and for social bonding with relic moral values (and if morality is part of that bonding),
And finally, the sheer inability of sapiens to change their minds as and when realities change.
Crazy as it sounds, economists answers to these questions have no skin-in-the-game and if-you-have-a-hammer-every-problem-is-like-a-nail syndrome:
These questions may be important, but the answers lie outside the domain of economics. For environmental problems, turn to the life sciences; for social problems, turn to sociology and anthropology; for psychological problems, turn to psychology; for crime, turn to law; and so on.
Economics can deal with these questions through its standard policy toolbox: taxes and subsidies, government regulations, quotas, remuneration schemes, and other instruments that provide monetary incentives for some behaviors and forbid others.
Shower shares some positive news and I read with a healthy dose of skepticism:
Now the practitioners’ patience with mainstream economics is wearing thin. Unlike the academic economists, the practitioners must actually address the great economic questions of our time. They cannot afford to be satisfied with the two above-mentioned standard answers. They cannot accept that these questions lie outside the domain of economics, even though they have many important economic causes (the world economy as driver of climate change, economic inequalities as drivers of populism and social fragmentation, and so on) and many important economic consequences (climate change driving migration, populism leading to protectionism, and so on). Nor can the practitioners be content with the economists’ standard policy toolbox, since these instruments are obviously not overcoming the growing problems of climate change, social conflict, “deaths of despair,” containment of the Covid-19 pandemic, and much more.
And finally, the practitioners are no longer enamored by the mainstream narrative on the division of responsibilities. Consumers in their millions are taking an interest in the social, political and environmental consequences of consumption and production activities, school children are out in the streets in protest about climate change, international organizations are beginning to measure economic performance beyond GDP (such as through the OECD’s Better Life Index and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals), businesses are beginning to measure business performance beyond shareholder value (such as through Environmental, Social and Governance criteria along with the initiatives of the WEF International Business Council, the OECD Business for Inclusive Growth coalition, the Value Balancing Initiative, the British Academy’s Future of the Corporation programme), national governments are beginning to design budgets with regard to notions of wellbeing that extend beyond consumption of goods and services (such as New Zealand’ wellbeing budget). In short, the practitioners are not waiting for the mainstream economics profession to adjust to reality; instead, they are forging ahead on multiple fronts, extending the domain of economics to the existential challenges we face.
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This is a different starting point from the one underlying mainstream economics. The discipline of economics is based on classical physics, i.e. the inanimate world. Evolution, by contrast, is appropriate to the animate world. Not a bad point of departure for economics. After all, humans are living creatures. If we choose this path, economics will be reaching its Darwinian – not Copernican – Moment.
This is why now is probably the most exciting and fruitful time ever to become an aspiring economist. The Dutch philosopher Erasmus famously said:
“At the end, you will ask yourself: What have I made of my life? That wish you wish to answer then, do now.”
Who would not wish to be alive and active at such a moment, when a great contribution is waiting to be made and there is no one around to execute you for it?
This is the beauty of life. As of today, we know that this beauty doesn't exist anywhere in any other universes, galaxies, and whatever other nouns we have in physics. It is fundamentally despicable to destroy this beauty for gastro-intestinal pleasures. Stop killing our fellow life partners on this beautiful blue planet.
“I think Gánti has thought deeper about the fundamentals of life than anybody else I know”
Hungarian born biologist Tibor Ganti's model of the simplest possible living organism, which he called the chemoton, that points to an exciting explanation for how life on Earth began.
The origin of life is one of science’s most perplexing mysteries, partly because it is several mysteries in one. What was Earth-like when it formed? What gases made up the air? Of the thousands of chemicals that living cells now use, which ones are essential—and when did those must-have substances arise?
Perhaps the hardest question is the simplest: What was the first organism?
Chemoton, Gánti’s concept of the simplest possible living organism: genes, metabolism, and membrane, all linked. The metabolism produces building blocks for the genes and membrane, and the genes exert an influence over the membrane. Together they form a self-replicating unit: a cell so simple it could not only arise with relative ease on Earth, it could even account for alternate biochemistries on alien worlds.
“Life is not proteins, life is not RNA, life is not lipid bilayers. What is it? It’s all those things hooked together in the right organization.”
Like most sapiens, I do have my quota of bad genes. Since Max was a puppy, I have been working to "mute" them as humanely as possible - one day at a time (thanks to Epigenetics - whatever that means at this point and time). The good news is the compound effect has played its part and helped me tremendously.
Epigenetics, the study of the code that controls our DNA, tells us that our lifestyle choices can have a significant impact on our gene expression and our lives - BBC Video. The three pillars are:
Mind (Meditation, sadly I have skipped this since Max was ill)
Mouth (Healthy food)
Muscle (Work out and Walk an hour a day)
The important message - it is never, never too late. So start today.
Diet was one of the critical culprits in Max's illness. The crazy thing was I was so "convinced", he was eating healthy (using the logic of bullshit relativism of how other sapiens feed their dogs). There are so many mistakes I made because of a lack of knowledge. He did eat fruits and vegetables but the base diet was mass-produced with once a week home-cooked meal. Whatever little knowledge I gained on this front was from seeing Max suffer for almost 2 years.
Now, Neo, Fluffy, and Graph are entirely opposite; no mass-produced/outsourced food, all their meals are fresh food, Neo's treats are mostly fruits/veggies, many supplements (turmeric, milk thistle, etc.), and mushrooms extracts.
The important question which the BBC video doesn't cover is the "why" question. Why is that a "bad" gene is malleable? The short answer is there is nothing called bad genes.
In a nutshell, a simple hierarchy of actions:
1. Take care of oneself using age-old wisdom of mind, diet, and activity. Knowledge of evolutionary biology is crucial here. Grandma's wisdom is important but not everything grandma said was correct.
2. Follow insights from science and do a constant Bayesian update. The hardest task is to get an intuitive understanding of what research and who to trust. There is no magic bullet here but healthy skepticism with help of evolutionary biology will do the trick over the years. Ignore everything from the popular news and beware of confirmation bias.
3. Sponsoring/supporting scientific research. Support comes from donating microbiome, gene, blood, and other data. The rest is left to hope, love, and god or whatever abstractions you believe. This is what stoics called not under our control while we are at the mercy of randomness.
Annaliese Griffin in this thoughtful post asks people to drop the insane metrics of weight and calories and proposes five simple checklist questions to answer every day:
How much green stuff are you eating?
What did your body do for you today?
How stoked are you to move your body?
Are you sleeping enough?
How are you checking in on your mental health?
Taking care of one's body and mind is not only for prevention but most importantly to live and feel life differently. One cannot feel how feeling different feels like unless one experiences that feeling. So try.
Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. Grief does not obey your plans or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
Maria Popova has a beautiful piece drawing an analogy between love and grief:
Like love, grief swells into an entire inner universe that comes to color the whole of the outside world. Like love — that rapturous raw material for most of the songs and poems and paintings our species has produced — grief lives itself through the grieving and can’t but speak its truth. Unlike love, our culture meets the voice of grief with an alloy of disquiet and denial. We want to make the sadness go away, to lift the sorrowing heart out of its sorrow immediately. Often, we mistake for personal failure our inability to salve another’s grief or mistake for their failure the inability to snap out of it on the timeline of our wishes.
Life without Max will never be the same. He left me with a black hole and a small goldilocks zone inside it which keeps me alive. Being with him for 13 plus years I became a new being and now, grieving his loss who knows what it will bring tomorrow?
There is no timetable, no cure, no self-deception - I will continue to feel whatever I feel until it feels so.
I will miss my Max for the rest of the time but I will not destroy myself in self-pity. The life we lived together keeps me going and I am ok even if it boils down to only kissing his ashes next to my bed.
I don't want to repeat what I have written many times last year.
We all know how ridiculous new year's resolutions are. So whenever you are ready and most importantly "understand" grief and loss then please don't do this to your friends and family.
And when the time comes for you to grieve (yes, it will happen to everyone) then take your time even if takes an eternity.
Act, eschew ideology, speak less, improve awareness, and change your body, mind and your little world consciously in 2021.
