Free Markets, Power & Self-Deception

I don't agree with some parts of this essay but the part on power and self-deception is immensely under-rated and unknown. For starters when somebody criticizes the free market doesn't mean they are pro-socialists. Socialism is lost and failed. We need to work to move the free market from 1.0 to 1.1 and then 2.0 and so on.  The only thing that is stopping this from happening is self-deception and ideology. 

There are two big problems here. First, economists assumes that we know our preferences. But this isn’t always true. Evolution often produces what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls ‘competence without comprehension’. An organism can be competent at surviving without knowing what it’s doing. It’s called instinct, and it leaves no role for conscious ‘preferences’.

Second, economic theory leaves no role for self deception. A utility-maximizing agent can’t have preferences that are against its self interest. That would contradict the premise of the model. In contrast, modern evolutionary theory makes clear that our ideas can be delusional. In fact, we expect a disconnect between ideas and reality.

The reason is that human life is marked by a fundamental tension. We are social animals who compete as groups. For our group’s sake, it’s best if we act altruistically. But for our own sake, it’s better to be a selfish bastard. How to suppress this selfish behavior is the fundamental problem of social life. 

The solution that most cultures have hit upon is to lie. We convince ourselves that prosocial behavior is good for the self. Oddly, however, free-market ideology seems to buck this trend. Rather than preach the merits of community and brotherhood, it preaches the merits of selfishness and greed. How can that be good for the group?

It’s possible that it isn’t. Free-market ideas may well be toxic to groups. But there’s another possibility, one that I think we should take seriously. The alternative is that free-market ideas do promote altruism … just not the kind we’re used to thinking about. They promote altruism through power relations. And they do so through doublespeak. Free-market ideology uses the language of ‘freedom’ to promote the accumulation of power.

For more on self-deception checkout the master - Robert Trivers book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

The $60,000 Telegram That Helped Lincoln End Slavery

Ainissa Ramirez in her book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another talks about how the telegraph helped Lincoln end slavery - here's a fascinating excerpt: 

But, Lincoln thought about the weekly military reports that tallied the thousands of Civil War casualties. “It is easier to admit Nevada,” he told Charles Dana, his Assistant Secretary of War, “than to raise another million soldiers.” The math was simple in Lincoln’s mind, for a new state could cast three electoral votes, votes he needed for reelection. “It is a question of three votes,” said Lincoln, “or new armies.”

Nevada, he reasoned, was his best chance to vote for him and his Republican party. While Nevada wasn’t as populated, it was pro-Union, since many of the residents came from the North, and it was also pro-Republican in the truest sense of the word: It believed that power resided in the federal government, and that the federal government should intervene with economic policies. Nevada had also been a team player. It guarded the Overland Mail route, which allowed the East to communicate with the West via stagecoach, and also Nevada contributed hundreds of millions of dollars from its mines, offsetting the cost of the Civil War.

To help the birth of the state, an Enabling Act was approved by Congress to start the process of putting this largely uninhabited territory on equal footing with more populous states, like New York. The requirements for statehood were clear: The territory should not have slaves. (This was straightforward, since Nevada had at most 360 blacks.) A territory should tolerate various religious sentiments. (This was ignored, for Nevada was fashioned from a disdain for Mormons.) And, the territory should relinquish unappropriated public land. (This was simple too, for the region was vast.) The other stipulation of this Enabling Act was the state constitution had to be ratified and a copy had to be on the president’s desk (with enough time for elections in early November of 1864). That requirement was not going to be easy.

[---]

One common way of getting a long document across the country was by boat. After a courier reached the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco, which took a couple of days, they would board a ship that headed to the Isthmus of Panama. They then crossed it by mule, and then continued on by boat up to Washington, D.C. The other way to get a document across was the stagecoach. In the 1850s, the Overland Stagecoach was created. It took over 20 days to reach the Missouri River from the West; from there a message could be carried by train, taking about a week. Nevada’s Territorial Governor Nye sent several copies of the document both by land and by sea, and waited to hear the good news from Lincoln with a proclamation of statehood.

[---]

The document that Hodge and Ward had to send contained 16,543 words. The message began with, “His Excy Abraham Lincoln. Official — The Constitution of the State of Nevada…,” followed by what would be equivalent to 40 single-spaced pages of text. The work was onerous, but this was Nevada’s opportunity to join the world stage, and also influence it. Opportunity knocked with the pitter-patter of telegrapher fingers.

The tapping went on for 12 hours, with Hodge, who was on the second shift, finishing at 5:30 the following morning, before the sun rose. Except for finger fatigue, there was no trouble sending the message. However, there was trouble on the receiving side. There was no direct line between Carson City and Washington, D.C., so the message had to be sent to three different relay stations on its way East where the dots and dashes were translated into words and then converted back into dots and dashes and then sent to the next leg.

In Salt Lake City, the telegrapher did not expect such a deluge and got tired after a while. One person substituted for him, but didn’t last long, and then another sat in, and then a third, before the first operator returned and finished the work. Once the dots and dashes were received in Salt Lake City, they were copied down and then sent 1,400 miles to Chicago, and then 800 miles to Philadelphia, before finally reaching Washington, D.C., 150 miles away. Thousands of dots and dashes marched across the country inside metal telegraph wires with the mission to help Lincoln abolish slavery in the land.

When these electrical impulses finally reached the last leg of their journey, they were sent to the telegraph office of the War Department. This transmission was of such importance that intelligence from the warfront was put on hold for five hours to make way for Nevada’s telegram. Hodge’s and Ward’s message took two days to get to Lincoln and the cost of sending the message was $4,303.27 ($60,000 today). Nevada’s electric constitution reached Lincoln on the evening of October 28 and he proclaimed it a state on the 30th. On the 31st of October, Nevada officially celebrated its statehood, which gave it the right to participate in the election a week later on November 8.

Temperature & Nutrients - Key Influencers Microbial Diversity

Grilli, whose work focuses on understanding complex phenomena by using simple rules, knew that to begin to answer that question, he needed to focus on ecological communities from many different environments, and for which a wealth of data already existed. It’s far easier to study a glass of ocean water or a spoonful of soil than a patch of forest, he explains. "Ecology is traditionally a data-poor discipline. But in the case of microbial communities, it’s much easier to get a lot of data on these communities, across several conditions,” Grilli says. "Microbial communities are everywhere. They are all around us, outside and inside us. So they contribute to many fundamental ecological processes around the world, and they determine in some part our health and well-being. Their impact on our lives and on our planet is immense.”

In parsing the abundance and diversity of bacteria in a variety of tiny worlds using a simple mathematical model, Grilli’s research suggests that environmental variability is the main determinant of whether a species is present or absent in a microbial community, and that environmental change — such as a change in temperature or nutrients — is the primary driver of fluctuations in the abundance of a species. "That sort of suggests the players are different — the species that are in our gut versus the species that are in the ocean are different — but the forces that shape them are the same,” Grilli says.

- More Here

On Hitch...

RUSHDIE: Well, he went on working up until almost the last minute. I remember when Hitch-22 was published [in May 2010]. He had an event at the 92nd Street Y, and they asked me to be the moderator. He was at his most brilliantly Hitch-like, entertaining this packed room. Afterwards, we had dinner at a little restaurant across the street. It turned out that earlier that morning he had been given the news of the extent of the cancer, and had essentially been given a death sentence. I thought, “What an extraordinary thing to be able to do, to receive that information and then come out in front of 1,000 people and perform.” It spoke to his willpower and maybe his willingness to believe that he would beat it in the end.

[---]

RUSHDIE: If Christopher were still around, what would he make of the world today? There’s this double crisis we’re in at the moment; on the one hand this pandemic, on the other hand this very urgent reexamination of race relations in the country, and all of that happening underneath the umbrella of Trump. You and I both signed this Harper’s letter [“A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” calling for an end to cancel culture, published July 7, 2020]. Somebody asked me the other day, “If Christopher were around, do you think he would have been canceled because of all his outrageous remarks?”

AMIS: Like his essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Wrong!

RUSHDIE: Wrong, yes, wrong! But one of the things one should be allowed to be is wrong.

AMIS: Contrarian was almost Christopher’s middle name. And he did show his contrarian spirit on quite important things like the Iraq War and the voting for Bush/Cheney in 2004. I don’t know for sure how he would have reacted to Trump in 2016.

RUSHDIE: Well, he would have had a problem because he hated the Clintons so much that for him to support Hillary might have actually been impossible.

AMIS: That’s a good point. I reread just the other day his last attack on Hillary Clinton. He zeroes in on the fact that she lied about her name. She said, “I was named after Sir Edmund Hillary.” And Christopher gleefully points out that Sir Edmund hadn’t yet climbed Mount Everest by the time Hillary Clinton was born and this lie alone should have disqualified her.

RUSHDIE: We have somebody who’s a more outrageous liar in charge of things right now.

AMIS: Remember how indignantly he pointed out that Reagan told a lie every day? Trump tells one every 10 minutes.

RUSHDIE: Now it’s 100 lies a day.

AMIS: But Trump is the nemesis of all sorts of ways of thinking. He’s anti-expertise, anti-allegiance, and

RUSHDIE: Anti-journalism. And that’s who Christopher was, apart from anything else. He was a journalist.

AMIS: You know, I always thought Trump was a one-term president if that—with or without COVID. Americans have a certain appetite for crassness and chaos, but that appetite is soon sated. And he’s clearly unreformable. Lying his head off, as a strategy, clearly wasn’t going to work as a response to a pandemic, but he tried it anyway.

RUSHDIE: No, his only method is to double down.

AMIS: To never change his thoughts.

RUSHDIE: There’s that line in [George Bernard Shaw’s] Arms and the Man where the soldier says, “Never explain, never apologize.” That seems to be his motto.

- Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie on Cancel Culture and The Hitch

Cambodia's Hero Rats Hunt Landmines & Save Thousands Of Lives

 

Good Bye SPB

Man desires for soil and soil desires for man. Soil succeeds at last, But the mind refuses to accept it!

SPB has given has so many memories via his mesmerizing voice... he will be missed but I listen to his songs almost every day... and will do so until I kick the bucket. Thank you, sir. 

He sang parts of this song aptly titled "Is it possible to live on this earth, without love?" without taking a breath

Anger Increases Susceptibility To Misinformation

Abstract

The effect of anger on acceptance of false details was examined using a three-phase misinformation paradigm. Participants viewed an event, were presented with schema-consistent and schema-irrelevant misinformation about it, and were given a surprise source monitoring test to examine the acceptance of the suggested material. Between each phase of the experiment, they performed a task that either induced anger or maintained a neutral mood. Participants showed greater susceptibility to schema-consistent than schema-irrelevant misinformation. Anger did not affect either recognition or source accuracy for true details about the initial event, but suggestibility for false details increased with anger. In spite of this increase in source errors (i.e., misinformation acceptance), both confidence in the accuracy of source attributions and decision speed for incorrect judgments also increased with anger. Implications are discussed with respect to both the general effects of anger and real-world applications such as eyewitness memory. 

- Full paper here (via MR). 

This is highly important in a lot of contexts including animal suffering. Hence, I avoid those conversations when it becomes clear that the other side would never change their mind.  In other words, I would rather talk at a wall and keep my sanity intact than talk to ideologically driven folks and lose my sanity. 

The Intelligence of Earthworms

A surprising list of villains who reduced animals as mere things with no proof except genesis of bullshit in their own minds - Seneca, Aristotle, Augustine, Cicero, and of course the master villain Descartes. 

Before Darwin came in for rescue, it was David Hume who first inferred all living beings have rational thoughts,  and emotions. Read the whole piece here; a small one but packed with history. 

By the beginning of the 18th century, however, faith in man’s uniqueness had begun to crumble. Now that Aristotle had been rejected, others sought to define thought and reason in broader terms, which eroded the distinction between animals and humans. Leading the charge was David Hume. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), he argued that thought consisted in ‘images’ arising from sensory data and that reason should be understood as a ‘mere disposition or instinct to form associations among such [images] on the basis of past experience’. Mindful of dogs and horses, he maintained that ‘beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men’. A similar argument was put forward by Voltaire in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). Yet while it was to enjoy a certain vogue in the early 19th century, some naturalists, such as William Whewell, remained unconvinced. Clinging to the theological wreckage, they refused to grant animals the same status as men; and, in the absence of any decisive proof, showed no signs of changing their minds. An impasse was reached.

Into the fray stepped Darwin. Born slightly over 40 years after Hume’s death, he was immersed in the new thinking. His grandfather, the zoologist Erasmus Darwin, had been a keen reader of Hume’s Treatise and such progressive ideas were a common subject of discussion in the family home. It was almost inevitable that he should take an interest in the question of animal cognition. But when he did, he approached it from a completely different perspective. 

In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin demonstrated that, rather than having been created in a singular act by an omnipotent deity, all varieties of animal and plant life had evolved gradually, over many generations, as a result of natural selection. Pursuing the implications of this argument further in The Descent of Man (1871), he went on to contend that man, too, was ‘descended from some pre-existing form’ and had evolved in response to similar processes. As both critics and supporters realised, this confounded any attempt to distinguish between men and beasts – and raised questions about their cognitive abilities.

[---]

Darwin found what he was looking for in worms’ burrows. To prevent air getting in, they have a tendency to block up the entrance to their homes using whatever is at hand. Their preference is, however, for leaves. Whereas, if they lacked reason, they might have been expected to seize them any old how, Darwin observed that they ‘acted in nearly the same manner as would a man’, dragging the leaves down into their burrows by the pointed tip, rather than by the stalk. To his amazement, they did the same thing even when given leaves from trees which are not indigenous to Britain and when presented with several leaves glued together. This could not be mere instinct. It had to be a sign of rational intelligence. 

Needless to say, Darwin would have been the first to admit that worms’ thoughts are probably quite modest. But that they think at all was enough to validate his theory of evolution – and to demonstrate beyond a doubt that all living things share similar cognitive processes. This is more than just a scientific fact, though. It is also a reminder that even the most humble of creatures demand our respect. For if even the worm can think like us, what earthly reason is there not to show them the same consideration as we show one another?

On Oysters, Circadian Rhythm & Why Seafood Is Brutality and Cruel To The Core

In February1954, a US biologist named Frank Brown discovered something so remarkable, so inexplicable, that his peers essentially wrote it out of history. Brown had dredged a batch of Atlantic oysters from the seabed off New Haven, Connecticut, and shipped them hundreds of miles inland to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Then he put them into pans of brine inside a sealed darkroom, shielded from any changes in temperature, pressure, water currents, or light. Normally, these oysters feed with the tides. They open their shells to filter plankton and algae from the seawater, with rest periods in between when their shells are closed. Brown had already established that they are most active at high tide, which arrives roughly twice a day. He was interested in how the mollusks time this behavior, so he devised the experiment to test what they would do when kept far from the sea and deprived of any information about the tides. Would their normal feeding rhythm persist?

For the first two weeks, it did. Their feeding activity continued to peak 50 minutes later each day, in time with the tides on the oysters’ home beach in New Haven. That in itself was an impressive result, suggesting that the shellfish could keep accurate time. But then something unexpected happened, which changed Brown’s life forever.

The oysters gradually shifted their feeding times later and later. After two more weeks, a stable cycle reappeared, but it now lagged three hours behind the New Haven tides. Brown was mystified, until he checked an astronomical almanac. High tides occur each day when the moon is highest in the sky or lowest below the horizon. Brown realized that the oysters had corrected their activity according to the local state of the moon; they were feeding when Evanston—if it had been by the sea—would experience high tide. He had isolated these organisms from every obvious environmental cue. And yet, somehow, they were following the moon.

For a while, Brown’s experiment became infamous, one of the most controversial results in biology. Scientists were just starting to appreciate that living processes vary according to environmental cycles such as the time of day, but every other major figure in the field was convinced these rhythms are ultimately driven by internal clocks; Brown’s lone insistence that organisms are plugged into mysterious cosmic cues was widely dismissed. The disagreement reflected a deeper, philosophical split regarding the relationship that living creatures have with our planet and the wider cosmos. Are we autonomous, self-running machines, or is life in constant, subtle communication with the Earth, sun, moon, and even stars?

[---]

Brown decided to investigate the most fundamental biological process he could think of: metabolism. He studied sprouting potatoes—in experiments that ran for years—as well as bean seeds, mealworm larvae, chick eggs, and hamsters, shielding them all from changes in temperature, pressure, and light. Although they were supposedly cut off from the outside world, he saw patterns in their metabolic rate that matched not just the movements of the sun and moon, but pressure and weather changes in the Earth’s atmosphere. Even the potatoes “knew” not just the hour but the season of the year. It was as if life were pulsing in time with the planet.

Brown concluded that the organisms were sensitive to external geophysical factors, perhaps minute fluctuations in gravity, or even subtle forces that hadn’t yet been discovered. In his rivals’ experiments, supposedly proving the existence of independent clocks, Brown argued that the subjects weren’t cut off from the environment after all. They were bathed in—and influenced by—subtle, rhythmic fields that varied as the Earth turned.

Such ideas were viewed as threatening by his peers. Several of them had fought to have their own work on daily cycles taken seriously by other scientists. Their professional respectability hinged on using rigorous, reproducible methods, and basing their theories on impeccable physical principles of cause and effect; Brown’s claims of mysterious forces were dangerous nonsense that jeopardized the field. His measurements weren’t accurate enough, they insisted, or he was seeing patterns in his highly complex data that simply weren’t there. Yet Brown was charismatic and articulate, and he was swaying public opinion.

Something had to be done.

The first major blow came in 1957, with an extraordinary paper in the leading US scientific journal, Science, in which a respected ecologist named LaMont Cole claimed that by juggling random numbers, he had “discovered the exogenous rhythm of the unicorn.” The satire was aimed at Brown and his team, and its message was clear: Their results were as imaginary as the unicorn itself. It was an unprecedented, personal attack and it “hit us very hard,” Brown recalled later. “We were everywhere encountering innuendos from this article.” In 1959, Halberg followed up by coining the term that now defines the field: “circadian.” 

- More Here

How Pseudoscientists Get Away With It

Attempts to inculcate what are called “scientific habits of mind” are of little practical help. These habits of mind are not so easy to adopt. They invariably require some amount of statistics and probability, much of which is counterintuitive. One of the great values of science is to help us counter our normal biases and expectations by showing the actual measurements may not bear them out. Then there’s the math. No matter how much you try to hide it, much of the language of science is math (Galileo said that). And half the audience is gone with each equation (Stephen Hawking said that). It’s hard to imagine a successful program of making a non-scientifically trained public interested in adopting the rigors of scientific habits of mind. Indeed, I suspect there are some people who would be rightfully suspicious of changing their thinking to being habitually scientific. Many scientists are frustrated by the public’s inability to think like a scientist, but in fact it is neither easy nor always desirable to do so. And it is certainly not practical.

There is a more intuitive and simpler way to tell the difference between the real thing and the cheap knock-off. In fact, it is not so much intuitive as counterintuitive, so it takes a little bit of mental work. But the good thing is it works almost all the time. True science is mostly concerned with the unknown and the uncertain. If someone claims to have the ultimate answer or they know something for certain, the only thing for certain is they are trying to fool you. Mystery and uncertainty may not strike you right off as desirable or strong traits, but that is precisely where one finds the creative solutions that science has historically arrived at. Yes, science accumulates factual knowledge, but it is at its best when it generates new and better questions. Uncertainty is not a place of worry, but of opportunity. Progress lives at the border of the unknown. 

[---]

Good science provides clear evidence that may only go so far. Scientists have to speculate, which could go one of two or three ways, or maybe some way they haven’t seen yet. But like your blood pressure medicine, the stuff we know is reliable even if incomplete. Unsettled science is not unsound science. The honesty and humility of someone willing to tell you that they don’t have all the answers, but they have some thoughtful questions to pursue, is easy to distinguish from the charlatans who have ready answers or claim that nothing should be done until we are an impossible 100 percent sure. 

- More Here