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bluewatsons · 5 years

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I. van Hilvoorde and L. Landeweerd, Enhancing disabilities: transhumanism under the veil of inclusion?, 32 Disability & Rehabilitation 2222 (2010)

Abstract

Technological developments for disabled athletes may facilitate their competition in standard elite sports. They raise intriguing philosophical questions that challenge dominant notions of body and normality. The case of ‘bladerunner’ Oscar Pistorius in particular is used to illustrate and defend ‘transhumanist’ ideologies that promote the use of technology to extend human capabilities. Some argue that new technologies will undermine the sharp contrast between the athlete as a cultural hero and icon and the disabled person that needs extra attention or care; the one exemplary of the peak of normality, human functioning at its best, the other representing a way of coping with the opposite.

Do current ways of classification do justice to the performances of disabled athletes? The case of Oscar Pistorius will be used to further illustrate the complexities of these questions, in particular when related to notions of normality and extraordinary performances. Pistorius’ desire to become part of ‘normal’ elite sport may be interpreted as an expression of a right to ‘inclusion’ or ‘integration’, but at the same time it reproduces new inequalities and asymmetries between performances of able and dis-abled athletes: we propose that if one accepts that Pistorius should compete in the ‘regular’ Olympic Games, this would paradoxically underline the differences between able and disabled and it would reproduce the current order and hierarchy between able and disabled bodies.

Introduction

There is a growing academic interest in issues that relate to sports, disability and classification [1–3]. Academics from a variety of disciplines deal with questions like: ‘Can we objectively classify human beings in sport?’, ‘Should health and disability be defined in objective or contextual terms?’ [4,5]. ‘How does the ideology of normalcy relate to elite sport?’ [6]. These questions arise from a broader philosophical debate on ‘performativity’, the theoretical notion that disability is ‘performed’ instead of a static fact of the body [7,8]. They are nourished by a more general debate on disability and theories of social justice [9,10]. The case of South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, also known as ‘the fastest man on no legs’, has particularly stimulated the academic interest from a variety of disciplines [11–18].

Pistorius is an outstanding athlete, who had the desire to compete at the Olympic Games. Running with carbon-fibre legs he is world record holder in the 100, 200 and 400 m and can even compete with elite athletes on ‘natural legs’. His desire to participate in a regular competition is surrounded by controversy and raises a variety of both empirical and (sport) philosophical questions dealing with the concepts of dis-ability, super-ability, enhancement and a fair competition. It is clear that Pistorius challenges our understanding of disability and that his case contributes to the blurring of some traditional boundaries. New technological artefacts such as innovative prostheses apparently help to turn ‘disabled’ people into ‘normal’ subjects.

What may be considered ‘normalisation’ in the context of daily life is at least ambivalent in the context of elite sport. Running on prostheses may be defined as an intrinsic aspect of the talent that is tested in a competition against ‘relevant others’: athletes who have the ability to show a similar talent. Pistorius is still officially classified as ‘disabled’, but this classification may not be relevant anymore if one abandons the criterion of species-typical functioning in favour of a contextual approach, an approach that looks at how the socio-cultural context of a certain trait is relevant for this traits definition [18].

In daily life, there is little reason to qualify people who integrate their prostheses into their ‘lived bodies’ as impaired. The demarcation between sport for the ‘normal’ and sport for the ‘abnormal’ rather demonstrates aspects of our understanding of what is and what should be considered a ‘normal athletic body’. Disabled athletes are literally constructed as such in the context of the culturally robust demarcation between Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. As is the case with other performance enhancing methods, the Olympic competition becomes a mechanism for evaluating athletes with a ‘normal biological body’ [19]. If Pistorius’ label as dis-abled does not relate to his body image and way of life in a non-sports context, what does this mean for the construction of a boundary between ability sports and disability sports? Are there valid arguments to exclude him from running against able bodied athletes? And how does this discussion relate to the general discussion on classification? We will attempt to answer these intriguing questions against the background of the discussion on the definitions of and demarcations between normalcy and disability and against the background of current discussions on ‘transhumanism’.

Being disabled as the norm for humanity

In the theoretical framework of the philosopher John Rawls, those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system [20]. Social class, gender or any other contingency should have no influence on the liberty individuals are to enjoy in the pursuance of their goals in life. Moreover, social and economic benefits should be distributed in such a way that they can reasonably be expected to be advantageous to all those who are worst off in the first place. Rawls aimed at this distributive justice (thus termed by him) to compensate for the differences in fortune that affect our lives. Justice is seen as being independent of luck and favouring a more equal distribution of harms and benefits. This idea is still often taken to be the basis for how we deal with issues surrounding the social inclusion of the disabled [1–3].

People with impairments of any kind cannot partake in society (and sport) as fully as they should, according to the principles of distributive justice. The principles of distributive justice therefore demand that we redesign the world around us to make it more accessible for everybody. This necessitates an answer to the question what obstacles can and should be taken away in order for the persons with disabilities to become part of other spheres of life. Making a public building accessible for the disabled is one but making elite sport accessible to them is another. Elite sport is, by definition, constructed around the notions of differentiation, categorisation and selection, all with the cause of showing ‘virtuosity’, ‘supremacy’ and ‘super-humanness’. Our dominant understanding of elite sport cannot be brought in agreement with some type of right to become an elite athlete on the basis of a right to a context in which all starting positions are equal. This is different from the right, for example, to receive good education. If one defines normalcy as average, excellence, by definition, excludes normalcy.

Differences between performances of able and disabled athletes can not be inferred from a definition of ‘the normal’. Modern elite sport celebrates abnormalities in many shapes and appearances, varying from extreme sized sumo wrestlers to extremely undersized gymnasts. In this light, it becomes difficult to justify the difference in admiration for the elite athlete and the impaired athlete with recourse only to concepts such as ‘talent’ or ‘effort’. Some talents are more valued in a society than others, in spite of a changing terminology that sometimes even seems to suggest that being disabled is an occasional experience of each human being.

If one were to grant a disabled person’s desire to become part of ‘normal’ elite sport by enhancing one or more aspects of his body, this may be framed as a way of ‘inclusion’ or ‘integration’. At the same time, this reproduces new inequalities and asymmetries between performances of the able and dis-abled bodied. To enhance the traits needed to function optimally in a society, is to take that society as the proper standard against which the functioning of people is legitimately judged. Enhancement of specific traits may count as justice through social inclusion but one could also defend that a just society is one in which people are not forced to conform and are not measured by a single yardstick. In that case, the yardstick itself should not be seen as neutral: it appears to be politically biased. When one defines what counts as a handicap in a contextual rather than a descriptive fashion, the notion of disability becomes political.

In contemporary (Western) society, social arrangements are based on the aim to provide people with the same starting position in life. Abnormalities that render this starting position inferior are therefore to be compensated. In many respects, the ideal of the elite sportsman has all characteristics of abnormality as well. However, in contrast to the physically or mentally challenged, the elite sportsman is not considered to be subject to societies’ assignment to normalise people’s starting positions. How ‘extreme’ and ‘beyond normal’ the elite athletes bodies and outstanding performances may be, they are still considered as cultural heroes, icons and even as examples for the average human being (even whilst some characteristics of elite athletes’ bodies may pose a handicap in daily life).

Elite sport is about excellence within the boundaries of ‘self-chosen’ limitations; disability sports originated from limitations through fate. Elite sport symbolises the athlete as hero; it reproduces elitist ideals about the (‘athletic’ and ‘beautiful’) body, about good sportsmanship and national pride. For many people, in disability sport, the athlete is still a ‘patient combating his limitations’, instead of an elite athlete with specific and outstanding talents.

The case of Pistorius holds a dichotomous con- sequence for the debate on equality and disability rights in sport. Pistorius’ not unrealistic desire to participate in the regular Olympics is illustrative of how technological progress and changes in definition blur the distinction between able and disabled, therefore contributing to the emancipation of the disabled. But his case may also contribute to an increased inequality, between those that are technologically ‘enhanced’ and those that are not.

Transhumanists look upon the case of Pistorius with excited interest, since Pistorius can be used as an icon for technological progress just as easily as for equality rights for the disabled. As Camporesi [12] states:

‘His [Pistorius] case is a snap-shot into the future of sport. It is plausible to think that in 50 years, or maybe less, the ‘‘natural’’, able-bodied athletes will just appear anachronistic. As our concept of what is ‘‘natural’’ depends on what we are used to, and evolves with our society and culture, so does our concept of ‘‘purity’’ of sport, and our concept of how an Olympics athlete should look.’

Transhumanism is a movement that seeks to advance technology in such a way that it would alter the human condition to something to which the term human may no longer be applicable. It seeks to achieve this through the means of genetic engineer- ing, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, virtual reality, etc. [21]. The problem with transhumanism is that in its desire to improve upon mankind, it may lead to an increase in the division between the ‘tech-rich’ and the ‘tech-poor’. Although Pistorius has no transhumanist aspirations, his case could be seen a first step towards the transhumanist dream of a post-humanity. Apparently, Pistorius’ case can be brought forward in support of equality between able and disabled, but it may also amount to an inadvertent support of transhumanism. When posited in support of trans- humanism, his case may lead to an increase rather than a decrease of equality.

The ideology of the ICF versus the logic of sports

The ambiguity of Oscar Pistorius’ status as either a ‘dis’-abled, ‘abled’, or even ‘super’-abled sportsman carries along some interesting consequences for both the classification of impairments, disabilities and handicaps and the classification of disabilities sports and elite sports. The ‘International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps’ (ICIDH) has been replaced by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) at the start of this century [22]. In general, this change of terminology reflects a shift in focus from disabilities to abilities and capacities. Disability is not regarded a characteristic (that is present all the time) but a state that may be present in certain environments or results from specific interactions with other people. With this change, the concept of health changed from a bio-statistical (‘objective’) conception to a more contextual conception. Being disabled is no longer considered as something one is by definition (‘by its nature’), but something one becomes in relation to specific environments [23]. Disabilities are socio-cultural constructions rather than natural kinds or given states of being. People can become disabled by their environment or by specific (lack of) technologies. A person with an average intellectual ability may ‘become’ less able in an environment consisting of highly gifted people. An elite athlete who chooses not to use performance-enhancing substances may become ‘dis-abled’ in a context in which the use of doping is ‘normalised’.

There is still an active discussion on the value of the ICF. Critics argue that it still leads to a desire to classify individuals according to disabilities. The philosopher of health, Lennart Nordenfelt, wrote a critical article on the ICF in this journal in 2006. Nordenfelt stated that

‘The will is a crucial notion in all action theory. But the will is quite absent in the theory of the ICF. [ . . . ] Ability and opportunity are not sufficient for the performance of an action . . . one must first intend to act or want to act’ [24]. According to this ability-centered theory of health, the ability of health should be related to the realization of the person’s vital goals: ‘The ultimate goal should be to enable the individual and give him or her opportunities to participate in the way and to the extent he or she wants and chooses to participate’ [25].

What about the vital goals of Oscar Pistorius? Although this debate on the value of the ICF focused on the goals of rehabilitation, this case illustrates the rather subject-oriented position of Nordenfelt. As has been put forward by Reinhardt et al. [26] in their response to Nordenfelt, the will of an individual, how he or she wants and chooses to participate is, not in the least in the context of elite sports, highly restricted by social, political and ideological circumstances. Moreover, classification is a sport specific process and of major importance in all sports. Handicaps are artificially constructed and defined. Being a woman is seen as a sport specific ‘handicap’, otherwise they would be performing together with men. Being small and light is a handicap in boxing and wrestling compared to bigger and heavier athletes. Participation is not based upon an ideology of ‘inclusion’ and ‘sameness’, but based upon differences in talent, classified on the basis of relevant inequalities.

There is a clear friction between Pistorius’ qualification as ‘super-abled’ and his vital goals that are based upon an alternative understanding of normality and ability. Most of the empirical studies on this subject support this label of ‘super-ability’. Much of the academic debate did not so much deal with his vital goals, but rather with the empirical question how his achievements have been influenced by his artificial legs, therefore not centering on whether Pistorius should be classified as a disabled sportsman, but on whether he should be disqualified as having an unfair advantage. Based on a study by the Institute of Biomechanics and Orthopaedics (German Sport University, Cologne), the IAAF concluded that an athlete running with prosthetic blades has a clear mechanical advantage (more than 30%) over someone not using blades. Pistorius responded to this challenge that his prosthetics also confront him with disadvantages, such as the fact that he uses more energy at the start of the race than other runners. Recent findings suggest that running on lower-limb sprinting prostheses is physiologically similar to intact-limb elite running (measured in mean gross metabolic cost of transport), but mechanically different (longer foot-ground contact, shorter aerial and swing times and lower stance-averaged vertical forces) [11,17].

Even if there is evidence that running with prosthetics needs less additional energy than running with natural limbs, this in itself would be an insufficient argument to keep Pistorius from competiing in the Olympics. There is no standard test available to judge different bionic legs and compare them with ‘normal’ legs’ [18]. Besides, ‘if there is any reason to believe that Pistorius’s prostheses afford him some degree of unfair advantage [ . . . ] then surely there has been a similar, nay greater, risk of unfair advantage in all of his paralympic competing up to the present’ [16]. Categories within disability sports are much fuzzier and more variation in the quality of technology (such as prosthetic limbs) is accepted within disability sports, which provides unfair advantages for some of the athletes. But these unfair advantages within the Paralympic Games do not seem to be such a high concern by the International Athletic Federation.

The ideology mirrored by the ICF conflicts with the discussion on classification within disability sports, with respect to diverging perspectives on the meaning of obstacles. Although the ICF aims at the removal of obstacles (to minimalise any disability), and Nordenfelt adds to that the will to overcome obstacles, sport is however defined by a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles [27]. Sport is about creating ‘artificial dis-abilities’, not about taking them away.

Prostheses not necessarily define Pistorius as ‘dis- abled’. On the basis of a definition of his abilities there is no good argument to exclude Pistorius from the Olympic Games. Prostheses are however part of the definition of the game. The question if Pistorius should be labelled as either super- or dis-abled is not that relevant for his in- or exclusion. More relevant is the question what kind of a game is he playing. The question how to define a game deals with criteria for the relevant athletic performance. The standards of excellence for each specific sport are based upon judgements that are informed by scientific, conceptual and ethical evidence [15]. The questions for example if ‘klapskates’ could officially become part of the game of long track speed skating, if Fosbury’s masterful redefinition of high jumping was within the rules of the game are conceptual matters of definition and sport ethical analysis (grounded in notions of fairness and safety) [28]. If re-skilling a technique is necessary as a result of such redefinitions, than accessibility of new technology is crucial. The athletic edge that is gained should always be attributed to someone’s own athletic skills, and not on the basis of an unequal distribution of means and superior technology.

In dealing with such issues of fairness and definition in sport, the process of decision making also remains crucial. Who is eligible to make informed decisions about the rules and definition of the game and on what grounds? These informed decisions can be made by a broad practice commu- nity that have an interest in the quality of the game itself (such as athletes, coaches, officials, scientists), that are highly knowledgeable on the sport, but without apparent (commercial or athletic) interest in a certain outcome of the decision process. Manufactures (and sponsors) of high-tech swimming suits eventually harmed the game of swimming when they had too much control on the rules. This was more or less corrected by the community of swimming itself. Similarly, it is clear that manufacturers of prostheses should not be involved in defining the rules of disability sports, unless they are clearly involved in organising an equal distribution of technological means for each specific category of disability.

Disability sports are about showing performances within categories of similar disabilities, without making those disabilities the central element of athletic prowess. Running on prostheses may be defined as crucial for the specific talent that is tested in a competition against ‘relevant others’: athletes who have the ability to show a similar talent. The advantages of a prosthesis in this case bear upon the ‘relevant inequalities’ of the sport. Pistorius is not playing the same game as his opponents because he is showing another and extra skill, namely handling his prosthesis in an extremely talented way.

At first sight it seems that the inclusion of Pistorius in the Olympic Games is in accordance with the ideology behind the ICF and in accordance with the realization of his vital goals [5]. It could be argued that the case of Pistorius blurs the distinction between elite sports and the disabled sports. His ‘promotion’ to the elite level of sport may be considered as a form of empowerment and a symbol for non-discrimination. On the other hand, one can foresee a new boundary between disabled people into two categories: first the invalid, dependent and incapacitated and second ‘that much celebrated media persona of the disabled person who has ‘overcome adversity’ in a heartwarming manner and not been restricted by his or her ‘flaws’, but believes that ‘everything is possible’ for those who work hard’ [16]. Of the limited available ‘scripts of disability’ [7], the ‘inspirational overcomer’ dominates the image of the heroic disabled athlete. The blind runner Marla Runyan received much less attention for the five gold medals that she won in the Paralympics of 1992 and 1996, but really became famous when she competed in the ‘normal Olympics’ in 2000, and finished 8th in the 1500 m. This difference in status confirms the idea that ‘overcoming a disability’ seems a more out- standing performance than winning gold in the Paralympic Games. But when a disability can be compensated in such a way that the compensation provides for a ‘super’-ability in a specific context, compensating for a disability may prove to be a step beyond ‘normal’ humanity or even a step towards ‘transgressing’ humanity.

The case of Pistorius (and more will follow) stimulates the ideology of transhumanism, and the transhumanization of ableism: ‘the set of beliefs, processes and practices that perceive the ‘‘improvement’’ of human body abilities beyond typical Homo sapiens boundaries as essential’ [19]. What is perceived of as ‘better’, as ‘enhancement’ and what not, however, is up for dispute. If there is no neutral ground on which to define normalcy and ‘super’-ability, any attempt at ‘going beyond’ normal functioning necessarily is politics disguised as science. Transhumanism therefore is an ideological project. It is the paradox of Oscar Pistorius that he could develop into a symbol for the ‘normalization of dis-abilities’, but at the same time into a symbol of a neo-liberal ideology in which specific talents of the individual ‘superhuman’ and ‘inspirational overcomer’ [7] are put on the stage as an heroic example. Pistorius may become a symbol for both a concept of equality through a justice of social inclusion and for a concept of inequality through enhancement towards a form of ‘super’- humanism.

Conclusion

On the one hand, society invests quite willingly in the super-abilities of the elite athlete whilst on the other it only does this reluctantly, and from an ethics of inclusion, with respect to the disabled. In the case of disabilities, one wants to eradicate abnormalities by equalising on the basis of ‘sameness’, while in the case of super-abilities we support abnormalities. This ‘selective investment in the abnormal’ and the admiration for the ‘genetically superior’ could be seen as a token of a society that cannot meet up with the criteria for justice [10]. On the other hand, sport is a competitive practice, whose internal logic consists of the display of an unequal distribution of abilities and talents.

There are good arguments for a radical change of the organisation and classification of traditional sports and for the need of a critical rethinking of the traditional boundary between Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. A more successful application of the notion ‘distributive justice’ would call for a change of the organisation and classification of traditional sports. Starting from a more liberal definition of categories one can also imagine the organisation of competitions that are not contrasted on the basis of an opposition between able and dis-able, but rather around the equal distribution and accessibility of new technology (including prostheses).

The claim that Pistorius has the right to compete directly against non-disabled athletes in Olympic events does not appear to be a strong claim. A stronger claim can be made for a separate bionic track event to be part of the Olympics. This however needs consistent rules on technical aids as well as an equal and standardised access to new technology. The inclusion of just one (‘Paralympic’) event will also create new inequalities and asymmetries between performances of able and dis-abled athletes. Pistorius’ wish to become part of ‘normal’ elite sport may be framed as a way of ‘inclusion’ or ‘integration’, but paradoxically underlines the differences and reproduces the current order and hierarchy between able and disabled bodies.

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#disability #sports #ethics #classification #enhancement #technology #transhumanism #prostheses #oscar pistorius #medical model of disability #human enhancement #social model of disability #ethics in sport #normativity

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chanoyu-to-wa · 5 years

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Nampō Roku, Book 3 (18.8): Two Arrangements for a Karamono-chaire and a Dai-temmoku on the Fukuro-dana.

18.8) Two arrangements for a karamono-chaire¹ and a dai-temmoku² on the fukuro-dana.

[The writing reads: (to the left of the upper sketch) fukuro no uchi kae-chawan³ (袋ノ内カヘ茶碗); (above the lower sketch⁴) naka-bon⁵ ni chaire ・ temmoku (中盆ニ茶入・天目), (to the left of the lower sketch) fukuro no uchi dai⁶ ・ fukusa⁷ (袋ノ中臺・フクサ).]

_________________________

¹These are “ordinary” karamono-chaire*, pieces that do not merit mine-suri [峰摺��] placement. As such, while resting on their kane, they are placed very slightly off center -- this is what the pictorial orientation is intended to suggest. ___________ *According to his densho of 1582 or 1583 (the surviving manuscript is undated, but it must postdate the creation of the tsuri-dana [釣棚] during the summer of 1582), Rikyū would probably have included the old Seto chaire -- the pieces made under the direction of the chajin arriving in Japan from the continent during the fifteenth century -- in this proposal.

²While the temmoku was most likely also an imported piece (though the rare Japanese-made temmoku were often technically identical, and generally handled in the same manner -- frequently not being distinguished from the imported pieces*), the chawan was felt to be intrinsically inferior to the chaire†, hence its usual arrangement in a slightly inferior manner. ___________ *Rikyū’s ake-temmoku [赤天目] (shown below) is a good example.

While it is unclear what he actually believed regarding its antecedents, he handled it and used it in the same way as a karamono-temmoku.

Furthermore, in the Yamanoue Sōji Ki [山上宗二記], the white temmoku (which were made for Jōō at the Seto kiln) are ranked highest, above all of the imported bowls. This suggests that, rather than simply being a manifestation of the mindset that favored continental pieces over local wares, the preference for imported chaire was due to their technical superiority to the pieces that were being made by the local potters. (Of course, this attitude underwent a change in the Edo period, when imported pieces were valued simply because they were imported.)

†While a chaire was felt to improve with repeated use (as the aromatic elements in the matcha work their way into the clay), chawan were originally used only until they began to exhibit signs of “contamination” -- for example, the crackles in the glaze becoming stained with tea -- and then replaced. The lack of crackles in the glaze on the Chinese temmoku may have been the reason why they stayed in use much longer than others.

While this idea started to weaken once chawan began to be recognized as meibutsu objects that were deserving of preservation -- which attitude was reinforced by Jōō’s own approach of amassing a large collection of such pieces -- their inferior status vis-à-vis the chaire continued to be a feature of chanoyu in Jōō’s day (as it remains today).

³Kae-chawan [カヘ茶碗].

The term kae-chawan [替茶碗] refers to a “substitute chawan” used to bring the chakin and chasen (and sometimes the chashaku, as in this case) into the room at the beginning of the temae, and which was used to clean the chasen at the end of the temae, using cold water (in order to protect the temmoku from being soiled by this process). It was not (necessarily) used to serve tea -- though this idea was being questioned more and more by the chajin of Jōō’s period (when the kae-chawan was often being used to serve usucha -- a practice that enhanced the temmoku’s status).⁴

⁴There is a critical issue -- apparently a copying error -- with this illustration, as it appears in the Enkaku-ji manuscript of the Nampō Roku. In Tachibana Jitsuzan’s original sketch (which is the version that has been reproduced here) -- the sketch he made with the Shū-un-an documents spread out in front of him* -- a futaoki is shown on the lower shelf, next to the mizusashi. Jitsuzan, however, apparently neglected to include the futaoki in the sketch that was prepared for the Enkaku-ji manuscript†. The futaoki, then, is absent from all of the sketches that were later based on the Enkaku-ji manuscript.

This is extremely important, since the presence (or absence) of the futaoki impacts on the kane-wari interpretation of the arrangement -- and its absence here has resulted in very confusing speculations (by certain commentators) regarding the way that the utensils arranged on the tray should be counted‡.

It would have been very easy to remove the futaoki from the sketch digitally, and so make it more closely resemble that in the Enkaku-ji version of this document. But since its absence there is obviously a mistake (without the futaoki it becomes impossible to rationalize the kane-wari for the goza), I felt it was best to leave the futaoki in the sketch, even though that means that I am no longer showing a likeness of what is found in the Enkaku-ji manuscript (which is the teihon [底本] on which this translation is supposed to be based). ___________ *We must assume that, regardless of the temporal constraints under which Jitsuzan was working (as has been mentioned before, he was only given access to the Shū-un-an documents for a limited period of time), the original sketches that he made with the Shū-un-an documents spread out in front of him necessarily would have had to closely resemble the documents that he was copying, especially in details such as this (otherwise he would surely have edited them on the spot -- since his purpose was to make a copy of the originals for his own reference and study: the idea of proselytizing the resulting material does not seem to have occurred to him until later). Thus, the accuracy of the first manuscript must take precedence over the copy that he made several years later. (Jitsuzan seems to have requested accessed the original documents in 1586, after examining a copy of the Rikyū Chanoyu Sho [利休茶湯書], while on his way from Kyūshū to Edo in observation of the sankin-kōtai [參勤交代], or “alternate attendance,” rule; meanwhile, the presentation copy for the Enkaku-ji was prepared between 1689 and 1690. The Rikyū Chanoyu Sho [利休茶湯書] was translated, in its entirety, previously in this blog.)

†A futaoki is not displayed on the ji-ita in several of the subsequent arrangements -- because it is placed somewhere else (or its absence plays into the correct count, so far as kane-wari is concerned). It seems that Jitsuzan may have looked ahead to the next page of sketches, and so overlooked its presence in this sketch.

‡The objects arranged on the tray are all counted as a single unit, since the tray itself contacts all of the kane with which those utensils are associated individually. Nevertheless, with the futaoki absent, this has lead some interpreters to argue that the objects arranged on the ten-ita should be counted as if the tray were not present at all. The result is a lingering confusion that taints their understanding of the rest of the Nampō Roku.

⁵Naka-bon [中盆].

As in the previous post, this is usually taken as a reference to the (meibutsu) naka-maru-bon [中丸盆], which measures 1-shaku 2-sun 3-bu in diameter.

There was, as Shibayama Fugen points out, also a hō-bon [方盆]* version (which measured 1-shaku square).

Round trays, however, were considered less formal -- making them more appropriate to the setting. Regardless of which tray was used, the fukuro-dana would still have been placed 1-shaku 2-sun away from the upper corner of the ro. ___________ *Hō-bon [方盆] means a square (or sometimes rectangular) tray. The word shi-hō-bon [四方盆], literally meaning a “square tray,” does not seem to have been used that commonly in Jōō’s period.

The 1-shaku square tray was not one of the Higashiyama gomotsu [東山御物] that were used by Ashikaga Yoshimasa, as was the naka-maru-bon; the square tray was first introduced by the early machi-shū practitioners, the mostly immigrant-chajin of Shukō’s generation.

The square naka-bon will appear in the next post.

⁶Dai [臺].

The temmoku-dai [天目臺].

In Jōō’s period (and before) these were either plain black-lacquered dai that had been imported from the continent* (a typical example is shown below), or (much less frequently) Japanese-made copies.

The reason the dai is placed in the ji-fukuro has nothing to do with its quality or antecedents. Rather, it is because the naka-maru-bon is the largest tray that could be used with the fukuro-dana†, and this tray is not sufficiently large to allow the temmoku to be displayed on its dai together with the chaire. ___________ *In China, these dai were used to hold the conical bowls in which heated sake was served in restaurant and drinking establishments (this is why many of them were painted with the marks of the houses from which they came -- so that they could be claimed by their rightful owners later: the Chinese, then, as now, delighted in having meals catered, and since this often involved different things being sent from several establishments, correctly sorting the dishes afterward became an issue) -- the sake was usually flavored with medicinal herbs, and the conical shape allowed the dregs to settle to the bottom, so they would not discommode the drinker. While quite commonplace objects on the continent, these dai became great treasures in Japan -- an almost worshipful attitude that was certainly helped by the trade embargo that followed the overthrow of the Koryeo dynasty (in the first years of the fifteenth century), and the establishment of the Josen tributary state (in the middle of the fifteenth century) under a Ming hegemony.

†The meibutsu nagabon that were typically used with the daisu when the host wished to display both the chawan and the chaire on a tray were not used with the fukuro-dana, since Jōō felt that these trays were too formal for the setting. Jōō selected the most informal arrangements for the daisu and elevated them to the highest rank in this new setting.

⁷Fukusa [フクサ].

This would be the host‘s temae-fukusa. While there were different ways it could be placed on the dai (the purpose being to cover the hole into which the foot of the chawan would fit), the simplest way was to fold the fukusa into quarters and rest it on top of the dai (with the corner that the host would need to grasp, to lift the cloth up and fold it, on the right), as shown in my sketch (below).

While I have colored the fukusa purple (and made it the size of a modern-day fukusa so that the hane of the dai will be visible -- these sketches are always carefully drawn to scale), for clarity, this is an anachronism. In Jōō’s period, the host’s temae-fukusa was always made of imported donsu, usually in a color scheme favored by the host (or, perhaps, his economics -- since the fukusa was used only once and then discarded, and cloth woven in unpopular colors was naturally cheaper), and they were generally slightly over 1-shaku square (meaning that the hane of the temmoku-dai would probably not peak out from underneath the fukusa, even by a little).

The first purple “fukusa” measuring 8-sun by 8-sun 2-bu were originally not made to be fukusa, but as small furoshiki (wrapping cloths)* in which lacquered containers of matcha were tied before being enclosed in a sa-tsū-bako [茶通箱] (for presentation as a gift to someone). The first time this kind of cloth was used as a temae-fukusa was on an occasion when Furuta Sōshitsu received a sa-tsū-bako of tea from Hideyoshi (forwarded to him by Rikyū, probably so that its arrival would coincide with the gathering). Since Oribe was already in the tearoom when the gift tea arrived, and had apparently not been expecting it, he had not prepared a second fukusa (the host’s futokoro is usually stuffed with so many things that a random fukusa would easily get lost, especially when the host was not expecting to use it, so Sōshitsu can hardly be blamed). Nevertheless, wishing to share the gift tea with his guests, he decided to use the furoshiki in which the natsume was tied as a fukusa when serving the tea in the sa-tsū-bako (a new fukusa had to be used with each new kind of tea, to prevent contamination). Rikyū was informed of this, and not only approved, but began to imitate the practice during his own chakai.

Oribe is the one who began to make his own fukusa of purple-dyed Japanese cloth† (and of the same size as these furoshiki, since he found that a fukusa 8-sun by 8-sun 2-bu was actually easier to handle than one made from a larger piece of cloth), and this idea caught on among the machi-shū in the years after Rikyū’s death (when they looked to Oribe for an explanation of the chanoyu of Jōō’s middle period as part of the effort to repudiate Rikyū’s influence on chanoyu†). ___________ *The practice seems to have been established by Jōō (though probably based on even earlier traditions). With imported cloth rare and costly, and since the furoshiki in which the container of gift tea was tied was used only once (and would not be seen by the guests -- immediately after removal it was tied in a knot and put into the host’s left sleeve), the best-quality native cloth available was used. Dark purple (it is almost black -- a deep brown-purple shade) was the most difficult color to achieve using natural dyes, hence it is the color that was preferred by Jōō for this purpose.

†Red fukusa arose from a very different (and confused) route. When Sōtan was called upon to serve tea to the court of Tōfukumon-in [東福門院; 1607 ~ 1678] (Tokugawa Masako [徳川和子], granddaughter of Ieyasu, and the consort of the retired emperor Go-mizu-no-o [後水尾天皇; 1596 ~ 1680]), he was distressed to find that the women’s lipstick stained the chakin like blood. Therefore Sōtan had his chakin dyed scarlet, to hide the stains. Later generations, hearing about the dying of the “tea cloth” red from the dyers, but lacking access to the details (the word chakin [茶巾] was sometimes used as an alternate name for the fukusa), people began to assume that the thing that was dyed red for the women was the temae-fukusa. Since this dichotomy fit into the Tokugawa’s neo-Confucian segregation of the sexes, women using a red fukusa became standard practice.

†Sōshitsu, who was 11 years old at the time, was introduced to Jōō shortly before the latter’s death. It is said that Jōō (who was no longer teaching at that time -- as was the convention of the day, where the actual teaching was done by the senior disciples gathered around the master) is the one who introduced Oribe to Rikyū, and advised him to seek instruction with this favored disciple (perhaps sensing some sort of fellowship of the spirit would arise between the two -- and, of course, pointing him in the direction of Jōō’s other main disciple, Uesugi Kenshin, would have been a disservice, since Kenshin was antagonistic to the direction that the government was taking, and association with him could have lead to the young man’s ruin). Nevertheless, the myth that Furuta Sōshitsu had studied with Jōō arose among the machi-shū after Rikyū’s seppuku (perhaps the rumor was started by Imai Sōkyū), and so it was to him that the group of which Shōan and Sōtan were members looked for guidance in those troubled times.

Oribe seems to have studiously answered their questions (only), while offering nothing about which his interlocutors were too ignorant to ask (the transcripts of these interactions are truly startling -- the depth of minute detail in Sōshitsu’s knowledge is absolutely breathtaking), and so carefully protected Rikyū’s legacy from being usurped by his antagonists. The result, unfortunately, is that most of what we associate with Rikyū was actually done by Jōō or Sōshitsu, while most of Rikyū’s true teachings went with Oribe to his grave (only to be rediscovered in the 20th century when Rikyū’s densho began to come to light).

==============================================

I. The first arrangement.

This first arrangement shows what might be considered the basic way in which a karamono-chaire and a dai-temmoku might be arranged together on the fukuro-dana. The chaire is placed on its kane (though not as a mine-suri [峰摺り])*, while the temmoku “overlaps” its kane by one-third (in other words, the foot of the temmoku -- not that of the dai -- is located immediately to the right of its kane). This results in a separation between the chaire and the hane of the dai of 2-sun.

The hishaku is associated with the right-most kane on the naka-dana, while the kō-dana has been left empty. And the mizusashi and futaoki have been arranged together in their compartment on the ji-ita, as usual.

While the kae-chawan† has been placed in the ji-fukuro, it is not included in the kane-wari count, meaning that the tana holds five units, and so is han [半]. ___________ *The ku-den elucidates this matter -- that, because this is a karamono-chaire (albeit not one of the very highest rank), it rests on the kane, though not as a mine-suri.

†Both the Shukō-chawan and the ido-chawan were used as kae-chawan in the early days, and an ido-chawan was most likely the kae-chawan on this kind of occasion.

The reason why a chawan of a different size was traditionally preferred as the kae-chawan is because, since this chawan has only a supporting role in the temae (aside from bringing out and removing the chakin and chasen at the beginning and end of the service of tea, its only other participation in the temae was to give the host a place to clean the chasen with cold water at the end of the temae), a second chakin is not necessary -- because, while the chakin is folded first in thirds when prepared for a temmoku (or other small bowl -- including things like the raku chawan), it is folded first in half when it will be used to dry a large chawan. Thus, even without a new chakin, a clean surface is presented for use simply through the act of refolding the chakin. This is not possible if the two chawan are of the same size (and in such a case -- according to the Nampō Roku -- two different chakin would have to be used, folded together rather as if they were a single chakin of double the usual width: the so-called “shin chakin” [眞茶巾] used by some schools in their higher temae replicates this idea, which seems to have been the inspiration, though apparently the ancients considered that using separate chakin, rather than one of double length, was “necessary” to completely separate the effects of wiping the first bowl from contaminating the second).

——————————————–———-—————————————————

II. The second arrangement.

Here the temmoku and karamono-chaire are arranged together more formally, by being placed together on a naka-bon. Though the sketch is a little confusing, the intention of the red line is to show that the chaire is resting on its kane, albeit not as a mine-suri [峰摺り]*. Meanwhile the temmoku (which is placed on the tray tied in its shifuku, but without its dai) is arranged so that it “overlaps its kane by one-third” (the foot of the temmoku is immediately to the right of the kane with which it is associated), resulting in a separation of 2-sun between the chawan and the chaire†.

Both the naka-dana and kō-dana are left empty‡, while the futaoki is placed next to the mizusashi, as usual.

Looking at the kane-wari, the tana here has a han [半] value, which is appropriate to the goza of a gathering held during the daytime**. ___________ *This appears to be the purport of the ku-den, according to the commentators.

†When the temmoku is 4-sun in diameter, and the chaire is a 2-sun 5-bu katatsuki (or other shape with the same diameter -- many of the kansaku karamono chaire [韓作唐物茶入] were made this size, while being shaped like the famous Chinese ko-tsubo [小壺]).

4-sun, and 4-sun 9-bu, are the standard sizes of chawan that match Jōō‘s system of seven kane. (The Shukō-chawan, with a diameter of 5-sun 2-bu, was too large to display in this setting, other than as a mine-suri.)

‡This naka-bon kazari [中盆飾], to use its formal name, was derived directly from one of the original daisu arrangements, and the daisu, of course, does not have these tana present between the ten-ita and the ji-ita. Thus, to leave them empty, is not a problem.

**For purposes of kane-wari, the empty tana are counted as chō [調]. Therefore, han (the ten-ita, which has a single unit arranged on it) + chō (the empty naka-dana) + chō (the empty kō-dana) + chō (the mizusashi and futaoki on the ji-ita count as two units because they contact different kane) gives a total of han.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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HOW YOU BUY A STARTUP

When eminent visitors came to see us, we were a bit sheepish about the low production values. Obviously that's false: anything else people make can be well or badly designed; why should this be uniquely impossible for programming languages? The urge to look corporate—sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve—is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace. In fact, they're lucky by comparison. And if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the reason that high-tech areas only happen around universities. Scientists don't learn science by doing it. He's now considered the best of that period—and yet not do as good work, on an absolute scale, as you would if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it seem as if he saw it as a drawback of senility, many companies embrace it as a valuable source of tips—more like manning a mental health hotline. The European approach reflects the old idea that new things come from the margins? Sure, it can be interesting if it poses novel technical challenges.

The whole tone is bogus. Someone like Bill Gates can grow a company under him, but it's confusing intellectually. The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. But when I consider what it would take to reproduce Silicon Valley in Japan, because one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive features is immigration. It's probably because you have to find peers for yourself, you stop learning from this. They happily set to work proving theorems like the other mathematicians over in the math department had the job of replying to people who like unions, because it takes less time to serve founders than to micromanage them. But it will be a good time to start any company that competes by litigation rather than by making good products. But I didn't realize why. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass.

GMail. The monolithic, hierarchical companies of the mid 20th century are being replaced by networks of smaller companies. It sounded promising. It must once have been inhabited by someone fairly eccentric, because a they may be on the board of someone who will buy you, and if you love to hack you'll inevitably be working on projects of your own. And since success in a startup, than smart users. Let's start with the most basic question: will the future be better or worse it looks as if Europe will in a few decades speak a single language. Even a bad cook can make a difference. When I finished grad school in computer science I went to visit my family twice. I was a philosophy major in college. Not wanting to blow such a public commission, he'd play it safe and make the talk a list of n things. And though this feels stressful, it's one reason startups win.

This talk was written for an audience of investors. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they haven't followed it to its conclusion. Up till a few years ago, writing essays was the ultimate insider's game. Google understands a few other things most Web companies still don't. Junior professors are fired by default after a few years ago, it turned out to vary a lot. Do you need a San Francisco? What fraction of the smart people who want to live where the smartest people and get them to come to your country.

If you're lucky you can get in three words. We never even considered that approach. But regardless of whether patents are in general a good thing, but slower. These problems aren't intrinsically difficult, just unfamiliar. I put the lower bound at 23 not because there's something that doesn't happen to your brain till then, but because it gives them more control. After all, as most VCs say, they're more interested in the people who create technology, and some may look quite different from universities. Young startups are fragile. That's the way to do that, you have to say actually is a list of n things is that we get on average only about 5-7% of a much larger number of neanderthals in suits. 7 billion, and the doctors figure out what's wrong. And I can see why political incorrectness would be a way to get to know good hackers. Getting money from an actual VC firm is a bigger deal than getting money from angels.

Universities and research labs—partly because talent is harder to judge, and partly because people pay for these things, so one doesn't need to rely on teaching or research funding to support oneself. Email was not designed to be used the way we now know something like our weight. Paris has the best eavesdropping I know. Although a lot of people to help them. What difference does it make how many others there are? A rounds are not determined by asking what would be best for the companies. You can't fight market forces forever. And if you're a quiet, law-abiding citizen most of the good people will be outsiders. Politics, like religion, is a concept known to nearly all makers: the day job. More people are the right sort of person who could get away with hiring thugs to beat up union leaders today, but if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. Microsoft's original plan was to make money, you tend to be in a place where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Whatever you make will have to be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is important.

That's why oil paintings look so different from watercolors. The reason these conventions are more dangerous is that they can do original work. But we knew it was possible to start a startup today, there are only three places I'd consider doing it: on the Red Line near Central, Harvard, or Davis Squares Kendall is too sterile; in Palo Alto on University or California Aves; and in Berkeley immediately north or south of campus. They also wanted very much to get rich, startup founders will almost automatically fund and encourage new startups. Whatever you build, make it fast. In those days you could go public as a dogfood portal, so as a company. Even hackers can't tell. The conversations you overhear. It seemed possible to start a startup when they meet people who've done it. Maybe it would be between a boss and an employee. The difficulty of firing people is a drop in the bucket by immigration standards, but would apologize abjectly if there was any signal left.

But the problem is more than just deciding how to implement some spec. Outsiders don't have to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few smart friends. Then I realized: maybe not. It's natural for US universities to compete with focus is to see what it's like in an existing business before you try running your own. And indeed, you can watch them learn by doing. Good PR firms use the same simple-minded model. They don't have time to work. One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into the houses. In the US things are more haphazard. At the time, were worth several million dollars. A real essay, as the name implies, is dynamic: you don't know very well, you can compete with delegation by working on larger vertical slices, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually done by multiple people and trying to do it, do it. It can get you factories for building things designed elsewhere.

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lauramalchowblog · 4 years

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The False Choice Between Science And Economics

By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD, PhD

As the nation wrestles with how best to return to normalcy, there’s a tension, largely but not entirely contrived, emerging between health experts—who are generally focused on maintaining social distancing and avoiding “preventable deaths”—and some economists, who point to the deep structural harm being caused by these policies.

Some, including many on the Trumpist-right, are consumed by the impact of the economic pain, and tend to cast themselves as sensible pragmatists trying to recapture the country from catastrophizing, pointy-headed academic scientists who never much liked the president anyway.

This concern isn’t intrinsically unreasonable. Most academics neither like nor trust the president. There is also a natural tendency for physicians to prioritize conditions they encounter frequently—or which hold particular saliency because of their devastating impact—and pay less attention to conditions or recommendations that may be more relevant to a population as a whole.

Even so, there are very, very few people on what we will call, for lack of a better term, “Team Health,” who do not appreciate, at least at some level, the ongoing economic devastation. There may be literally no one—I have yet to see or hear anyone who does not have a deep appreciation for how serious our economic problems are, and I know of a number of previously-successful medical practices which are suddenly struggling to stay afloat amidst this epidemic.

In contrast, at least some on—again, for lack of a better term—“Team Economy” seem to believe that the threat posed by the coronavirus is wildly overblown, and perhaps even part of an elaborate, ongoing effort to destroy Trump.

Yet even if some partisans are intrinsically unpersuadable, I suspect that if Team Economy had a more nuanced understanding of Team Health, this could facilitate a more productive dialog and catalyze the rapid development and effective implementation of a sustainable solution to our current national crisis.

For starters, it might help Team Economy to know that even pointy-headed academics appreciate that science is (or at least should be) a process we use, not an ideology we worship. Most researchers recognize every day how difficult it is to figure out biological relationships, and to make even the most basic predictions in the highly reductionist systems of a petri dish or a test tube.

Under typical conditions, scientists tend to do an exceptional amount of study before they cautiously suggest a new insight. It’s really hard to figure out how nature works, and each time we think we’ve understood even some tiny aspect of it, nature tends to surprise us again with an unexpected twist. While often maddening, this complexity is also what makes science so captivating, engaging, and intellectually seductive.

In the context of COVID-19, it is incredibly, absurdly challenging for anyone—including scientists—to get their heads around the rapidly evolving knowledge that is, in any case, preliminary and is being collected under difficult conditions.

This is not an environment conducive to understanding exactly what’s going on at a system-wide level, let alone a molecular one.

And yet, that’s what Team Health is trying to manage. They’re working to understand the very basic characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), while simultaneously extrapolating from the data in order to make recommendations that are going to impact the lives of billions of people.

There is a saving grace: researchers aren’t starting from scratch. They are informed by studies of related pandemics—the influenza pandemic of 1917-1918, the SARS outbreak of 2002-2004, and the 2009 swine flu pandemic, for starters. Investigators are also leveraging all they’ve learned about the biology of related viruses to make educated guesses about how to approach the current threat, and using recently-acquired knowledge of how to harness the immune system in cancer to think about how we might help the immune system respond more effectively to a virus.

Most scientists recognize the limitations of their knowledge, and realize just how hard it is to extrapolate—which is why they tend to avoid doing so. But they also appreciate that even if understanding is difficult and prediction even harder, the process of science—the meticulous collection and analysis of data, the constructing, testing, and reformation of hypotheses—has proven phenomenally effective over the long haul. It has enabled us to better understand illness and disease, and to provide humanity with the opportunity for longer and less miserable lives than ever in the history of our species.

And even if this potential is not realized either universally, nor as frequently as we might wish, it’s still the best construct we have.

It beats, for instance, hoping that a disease will simply disappear, like a miracle. Hope is not a method.

The Trump administration ought to listen to scientists, but it need not accept their advice uncritically. And that’s because behind closed doors, scientists never (well, hardly ever) accept the advice—or data—from other researchers at face value. They invariably question techniques, approaches, and conclusions.

The foundational training course my classmates and I took in grad school in biology at MIT essentially ripped apart classic papers week after week, exposing the flaws, and highlighting the implicit assumptions—and these were generally top-tier pieces of work by legendary scientists. I came away from the course with a powerful sense of the fragility of knowledge, the difficulty of proof, and a deep respect for the researchers who are driven to pursue, persist, and publish—despite these intrinsic challenges.

No individual or organization should be so revered that their findings are beyond scrutiny or evaluation, whether he or she works for a drug company, an academic institution, or an NGO.

But what rankles people on Team Health isn’t thoughtful skepticism from Trump about a particular piece of data (if only!), but rather Trump’s apparent indifference to science as a whole, and the ease with which he casts it aside if it fails to comport with his narrative-of-the-moment.

Trump seems to treat science like just another point of view, embracing it when convenient, ignoring it when not. This sort of casual indifference rattles the people on Team Health because, for all their disagreements, researchers tend to believe that there is an objective reality they are attempting to describe and understand, however imperfectly.

The notion that a scientist’s inevitably hazy view of a real phenomenon—drawn from well-described, ideally reproducible techniques—is indistinguishable from a “perspective” that some presidential advisor, or morning cable host, or guy on Twitter pulls out of . . . well, let’s say thin air . . . seems irresponsible.

And that’s because it is.

The good news is that Trump has a real opportunity in the coming days to leverage the advice of both scientists and policy makers, should he choose to listen.

In the last week, two important reports were published, each by a cross-functional team of experts. One was organized by the Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke, and includes Trump’s former FDA Commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, and one of Obama’s national health technology leaders, Dr. Farzad Mostashari. The other is from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Both groups suggest that transition to normalcy will require an exquisite ability to rapidly identify new outbreaks and track down and quarantine individuals who are likely afflicted—the ability to test-and-trace.

The idea is that our country needs the ability to conduct something close to a precision quarantine, where we constrain the activity only of those likely exposed — which requires, of course, accurately determining who those people are.

To their credit, both groups focus not on high-tech solutions that might be challenging to implement and potentially threatening to individual privacy (most Americans are not looking to emulate the policies of South Korea or China), but rather on extensive contact tracing involving a lot of individual effort. In other words: good old-fashioned disease hunter shoe-leather.

This approach requires not just a lot of dedicated people, but also a testing capability that we are hopefully developing, but clearly don’t yet possess. For example, a recent Wall Street Journal article quoted New Hampshire’s Republican governor Chris Sununu complaining that his state received 15 of the much-anticipated Abbot testing machines Trump recently demonstrated at the White House—but only enough cartridges for about 100 tests. “It’s incredibly frustrating,” Sununu vented. “I’m banging my head against the wall.”

The reason all this matters (at least if, like me, you believe the health experts) is that the rate at which the population is developing immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is remarkably low, according to UCSF epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford. He estimates the rate of population immunity in the United States is around 1 percent, and notes that it’s apparently only 2 percent to 3 percent in Wuhan—the center of the original outbreak.

Herd immunity—the ability of a population’s background level of immunity to protect the occasional vulnerable individual—requires levels more than 10 fold above this (the actual figure depends on the infectivity of the virus; for ultra-infectious conditions like measles, more than 90% of a population must be immune; for the flu, which is less infectious, the figure is closer to 60%; SARS-CoV-2 is likely to be around this range). This means that, in Rutherford’s words, “herd immunity for this disease is mythic”—until there’s an effective vaccine.

Translation: For the foreseeable future, almost all of us are vulnerable. And we will remain vulnerable until therapies emerge.

Health experts worry that without a transition that includes provisions for meticulous contact tracing, rushing headlong back to a vision of normalcy would likely result in a rapid reemergence of the pandemic, and potentially, a need for more wide-spread quarantines—which would drive a stake into the heart of any economic recovery.

The truth here is that Team Economy doesn’t need to push against Team Health, because they’re after the same thing. If Trump embraces a transition that recognizes both the economic needs of the country and the wisdom of leading health experts and policy makers, he may succeed in leading a weary but irrepressibly resilient nation out of our current crisis, and into a durably healthy, economically promising future.

David Shaywitz, a physician-scientist, is the founder of Astounding HealthTech, a Silicon Valley advisory service, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article originally appeared on The Bulwark here.

The post The False Choice Between Science And Economics appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

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kristinsimmons · 4 years

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The False Choice Between Science And Economics

By DAVID SHAYWITZ

This is not an environment conducive to understanding exactly what’s going on at a system-wide level, let alone a molecular one.

And even if this potential is not realized either universally, nor as frequently as we might wish, it’s still the best construct we have.

It beats, for instance, hoping that a disease will simply disappear, like a miracle. Hope is not a method.

No individual or organization should be so revered that their findings are beyond scrutiny or evaluation, whether he or she works for a drug company, an academic institution, or an NGO.

And that’s because it is.

The good news is that Trump has a real opportunity in the coming days to leverage the advice of both scientists and policy makers, should he choose to listen.

Translation: For the foreseeable future, almost all of us are vulnerable. And we will remain vulnerable until therapies emerge.

David Shaywitz, a physician-scientist, is the founder of Astounding HealthTech, a Silicon Valley advisory service, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article originally appeared on The Bulwark here.

The post The False Choice Between Science And Economics appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

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044-eu · 4 years

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True love, discussion

I had written this article resuming a hallucinatory discussion that a woman had made to a friend but after a while I realized that it seemed more and more childish. So I decided to rewrite this article. I have the pleasure and honor of meeting people of a certain age who would define love as something that begins when butterflies end in their stomachs. That feeling is based on custom, everyday life and reciprocity. When each side sacrifices a little of itself to understand the other. But where does this feeling and feelings in general come from? Our culture has always suggested a clear distinction between platonic love and erotic love. But are we really sure that the world is black and white?

The origin of love and natural selection according to my modest opinion

When I think about the origin of love,I like to close my eyes and imagine something much older than us humans. It may be conceivable that millions of years ago, some series of amino acids came to form the first protein, from that precise moment, a series of processes, perhaps of a fortuitous nature that will presumably lead us to be what we are Today. The first living cells would then develop from the proteins. These reproduce themselves through a process called cellular mitosis. Over time, some of these micro organisms would have evolved to form larger organisms, the cells these more complex organisms could have specialized in performing their function more efficiently. It might therefore be reasonable to assume that from here came a draft of what we in modernity can define as love. In my theory, in fact, normally, a multicellular organism lives much more than a single-celled organism because the cells that make up it "sacrifice", with a process called apoptosis, to make way for other cells younger and functional. And what is love but a sacrifice made for a good that is considered most important? How many of us could sacrifice our beings for a higher good, such as the health of the social fabric in which we live? Since organisms are interdependent on the environment in which they live, it is conceivable that gene differentiation has been necessary to better enable future generations to adapt to these changes and to promote the reproduction of those elements. prosecuting the species. A type of sexual reproduction would therefore arise in which two organisms would come united in order to generate a better subject, more suited to the environment or to the latter's continuous mutations. Life in nature must not have been easy at first and it is not easy even now anyway. We had to find a way for two subjects of the same species to trust each other enough. Another important thing was presumably also to allow the best subjects to have a better chance of reproducing. This characteristic has never given up life and is intrinsic in the genome of humans as well. Gradually, so-called natural selection would have created those mechanisms useful for the selection of the species. I think it is no coincidence that many people fall in love with beauty (understood as symmetry and health). And it is also no coincidence that anyone who is physically attracted to someone, has a tendency to approach and trust the latter. The attraction could also be expressed as the desire of someone to stable, useful, capable, intelligent, rich or powerful. The natural selection of many species, would have directed these towards a more marked sociality in order to promote the survival of the latter in the most effective way possible. The affection we can feel towards a person we consider very close to us could be the consequence of this mental pattern inherent in our genome. Such predisposition presumably could be the cause of the fact that we suffer much more from the loss of a person close to us. To this cynical view, one could object by arguing that over time the concept of love has evolved considerably away from those physical and natural factors that I have exposed previously. One example that could be made in support of this contrary thesis, is the fact that you can fall in love even with a poet. But while sensitivity could be seen as a contradiction, the latter could be understood as a normal predisposition to better look after offspring. Another objection that could be made is that love,although it is one of the most debated and studied feelings, is still obscure to people who are far more learned than I am. That's true, I'm certainly not a nobel prize. There are many people who feel they love even if they cannot explain this bond in a rational way. I could argue, however, that even pain, from a person who is not a professional, could be considered something inexplicable and above all, when you feel pain, you do not always have the will or the ability to rationalize the causes. It may seem a completely cold opinion and detached mine, but I believe in all conscience that, whether or not it comes from predictable and biological reactions, any feeling contributes to embellishing life. Contrary to the impression I think I gave with this article, it is the very existence of feelings that in my opinion makes life worth living. Especially when we consider a species like ours that has self-awareness and many of the mechanisms that revolve around existence. At this point, for the benefit (I hope) of those who want to continue with this reading, I think it is useful to quote some sources about what are the interpretations on the subject in question, that is, about love.

The most widespread love and traditions-religions

To sum up in a nutshell the concept of love in the various traditions and religions more widespread is an impossible task. We speak of concepts that have evolved over centuries and which still put a strain on the most enlightened minds of theology and philosophy. And so I hope you will forgive me if what I say below could be a somewhat oversimplified, partial and superficial analysis. It is also necessary to specify that over the years, in any religion, there has been a certain degree of evolution in the interpretation of words within sacred books. If we look at the Christian religion, carefully reading the Bible and the Gospels, we can appreciate a clear tricotomy of meaning. While there is no doubt that even at this juncture we are relying on sacrifice, understood as the sacrifice of the son of God for love of humanity (new testament) and a kind of love based on charity and compassion towards one's neighbour, on the other hand one cannot help but notice that in the old will God's love is a unconditional love. In fact, it seems clear that in the early part of the Bible, there is a clear reference to obedience. Simply put, if you are lied to God's word and his commandments, you can be sure that you are loved by God. Otherwise, examples of divine fury are not uncommon. All this, however, is mitigated by an inexhaustible divine mercy attentive to the certainly fickle nature of the human being. This vision is opposed by the Islamic religion, where it is the love of the faithful for God that is at the center of everything, more than in the Bible where, even, the son of God is tortured and tortured. In Islamic religion, however, there is the commandment to "love one's neighbour as one loves God." Again, love for God is privileged at the expense of all those earthly elements that make up the life of the human being. Personally, I noticed a certain resemblance to the old will. Immediately after God, there is a very important figure called "Muhammad": the prophet of God. To give an explanatory example I would like to cite a verse to better understand what kind of love we are talking about. "In three things man finds the sweetness of faith: that God and His Prophet be more loved for him than the rest; that loving the human being does not love him except in God." From here it is clear that loving one's neighbour is good only if he is in God, that is, if he follows the dictates of God and for the complacency of the latter. In Hinduism we have not a single God but a pantheon of divinity. Among the various deities, there are some that express a wide variety of concepts completely related to the nature of life and not least the concept of love. In the legends that tell of the Goddess Kali, for example, we can only appreciate physical love, distinctly sexual and aggressive. The Goddess Lakshmi, on the other hand, should inspire a sweeter, more protective and maternal kind of love. The Goddess Parvati, on the other hand, represents a much more spiritual and devoted love, the classic love of poets that survives death and is not based on physical appearance. The Goddess Sarasvati instead represents the love for science and the arts, what we would call a passion for something, a certain craft, an art or a hobby. It is a very lucid and rational love where the veils of traditional lovepenises do not find space. The Goddess Durga, like the Goddess Kali, represents the charm of the self-sufficient woman. Beautiful and powerful, it makes us understand how the Hindu tradition has always been attentive to what is the purely feminine aspect of human nature. Here charm, self-sufficiency and beauty are undisputed protagonists of legends. The Goddess Sita, on the other hand, represents marital fidelity, although in legends, this kind of love is not understood by the protagonists, it is one of the values considered very important in the field of love. In Buddhism one should practice a kind of spiritual love in which, while enjoying all aspects of the latter, it is necessary not to cling to anything because everything is transient. In fact, more than other religions, in this we practice a detachment that must involve all human passions in order to achieve the serenity necessary to try to understand the concept of enlightenment. Buddhism also preaches the need for goodness and charity towards others in an unconditional way. In stark contrast to some European traditions, love must always and still bring happiness to the loved one and therefore the reasoning behind many traditions evolved from Greek literature is not contemplated: "Those who want you badly make you laugh and those who love you make you cry". Another very important aspect, which is increasingly gaining its way into the modern culture of almost all peoples, is freedom in the couple. On many occasions, love in a couple may fail with time, especially you have relied on a love of a passionate and physical type. The duties and obligations that are assumed when two people decide to be together sometimes force people into moral cages in which they are not happy. These are some of the most famous and widespread religions, it is appropriate to stop here because the article continues in an attempt to follow other aspects. As I said, mentioning all religious traditions related to love,would be impossible in an article like this.

Love according to science

Again, do not expect that with a few paragraphs I will be able to expose all the scientific aspects that involve love,however I will try to make a summary. Although my experience suggests to me that for some tradition-religion and science, they are two aspects in stark antithesis, for me they are not at all. Over time, I realized that science is the direct evolution of philosophy that is the direct evolution of tradition. Until man has all the answers on all three aspects, there will be no such clear differentiation and none of them can be undone as many would like it to happen. These three subjects are as tied to each other as history is to modern life. Even if one day the oldest aspects were to disappear, I am convinced that we would lose much of the meaning of life, joy and charm that this should bring to each of us. I would have liked to give some examples of dull visions and compare these with each other but this article is getting too long. Science is something magnificent, it is the apotheosis of human reason, it is one of those aspects that makes the human being unique compared to other species. It is funny, however, to consider that it is precisely science, at the expense of the vision of many traditions, that suggests that the human being is not unique at all and is only an animal simply smarter than the others. Similarly, modern science suggested that love was nothing more than a set of chemical reactions without making any distinction between causes. Subsequently, with the significant increase in schooling and the number of individuals in recent years, we appreciate an ever-increasing diversification of the various sciences. Some aspects of a branch called positive psychology, define love with a set of micro moments. These would be brain biochemical connections between individuals. Neurology and psychiatry suggest that there are very specific and measurable subjective biochemical interactions that cannot be reproduced for ethical reasons at the moment. Some scientists even refuse to give meaning to the word love because they claim that it does not exist. Going into more specifics, they replace the word love with "illusion of being in love". This sensation would only result from an increase in oxytocin and dopamine in the blood. Some might argue that the increase in oxytocin and dopamine might be the effect but not the cause but with science it doesn't work quite that way. Since human experimentation is not considered, for most of the acceptable world's social fabric, that I know scientists have focused on experimenting on other less intellectually evolved animals. For example, Abigail Marsch of the American Chemical Society would describe in a video an experiment with voles. Since these animals are monogamous even when the partner dies, it was decided to administer drugs that block the inhibition of oxytocin. It has been observed that the vole in question, abandoning the mourning, was immediately consoled contrary to what the intrinsic nature of its species suggested. It is interesting to note, however, that such experiments are done on animals considering a purely sexual point of view because I do not have any reports of reliable studies that can prove that the platonic love experienced by animals can be controlled or induced. However, there are studies that show that animals also experience platonic love and even plants, in their own way and with different mechanisms. I find it astonishing, however, although science is not so far ahead in its certainties, the fact that many individuals reading an article on the internet, believe that everything they read is absolutely true or absolutely false. I believe that in whatever rule there is an exception and in whatever aspect life offers us, there are always nuances because the world is not black and white. Read the full article

#diaries #English #experience #love #reflections #science #theology

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newsfromthefuture · 7 years

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Archive AlphaLeaks Document Raises Questions About White House Staffers From Thomas Woods Foundation

The following document was discovered as part of the 2017 document dump from the Thomas Woods Foundation, a think tank that describes itself as “Bridging the gap between the Traditional Right and the New Right.” There continues to be speculation regarding possible links between the current administration and former members of staff at the Foundation. This document was originally published on alphaleaks.org, in the months before it's founder (whose identity is still masked by California supreme court judgement) was successfully sued by Alphabet, Google's parent company. Alphabet was awarded undisclosed damages rumoured to be over $13m, in relation to earlier documents published on the site.We have reproduced this document in full, and welcome clarification from the White House regarding current and former links between the president and the Thomas Woods Foundation.

An End to Poor: The Newgenics Manifesto.

This manifesto leads to some startling conclusions, but I believe the rich will have the moral clarity to pursue the truth to its ends. This manifesto makes no judgement about men or women, black or white, or any personal lifestyle choices the reader might make; it is simply a blueprint for a richer world for all those with the moral clarity to claim it. This manifesto comes in three parts:

1: A collection of uncontroversial facts about the nature of richness and poorness. 2: A set of conclusions that can be drawn from combining these facts. 3: A set of actions that these conclusions demand, for the good of society.

The ultimate action this manifesto demands is Newgenics: allowing the poor to die as God intended, and without them destroying the meaningful society created by the rich.

Facts

Being poor is not a matter of lacking wealth. The clear majority of the poor do lack wealth, it is true, but that’s not what makes them poor. What makes them poor is being born into a circumstance that fails to instill in them the values that make one ‘well-off’, ‘rich’, or ‘comfortable’ when those values are applied to the real world. We use a lot of euphemisms for it, but it boils down to the fact that being poor or rich is a matter of attitude, not wealth. The rich strive. The poor do not. This leads to the rich accumulating success and wealth, where the poor and the machinery of the state accumulate neither, and pass onto their children the toxic idea that neither are important.

Fact 1. Rich or poor is a matter of proper character.

Everyone could be rich, but many people lack the moral clarity and the personal strength to strive for it. There is often a drive to re-educate the poor, to instill in them the values and character of the rich; but this is flawed, in that if one is born intrinsically rich, intrinsically possessing those values that will drive him towards wealth and success, then one will seek out companions that have the same goals; whereas if one is intrinsically poor, one will not listen to these lessons no matter how many times it is repeated.

Fact 2. Free education cannot change someone from poor to rich.

The state is complex in terms of rich and poor- many rich people are drawn to positions of power and influence available to them in government, yet the vast machinery of the state acts much more like someone poor than someone rich. The machinery of the state: welfare payments; income taxes; corporation taxes; value added taxes; sales taxes; healthcare; education; pensions; all this machinery repeats the only prayer of the poor. ‘It’s Not Fair’ The machinery of the state props up poor thinking, props up poor judgement, and props up poor ideas that infect our society, that infect parents, and that keep people poor.

Fact 3. The machine of the state is poor, whether led by the rich or not.

When someone devotes their life to being poor- when they choose not to strive for success, when they choose to be rail against the "unfairness" of life instead of accept it and fight to win, they cease contributing in a meaningful fashion to society. For example, if a person chooses to care for a family member instead of pursuing an education into which they have sunk both time and money, that is a poor decision. Illness is intrinsically unfair, as are almost all natural occurrences. To give in to it- to waste time and effort on screaming into the wind, in an effort to turn it back- is a poor decision. It wastes energy and effort that could be used for meaningful progress, on both a personal and a societal level. Imagine if instead, this person med the rich decision to continue their education, to secure success and wealth, to ensure that never again would illness meet their family without being met with a tidal wave of resources! Instead they have selfishly chosen to waste their energy in an effort to feel less personal guilt over a random, natural, and naturally unfair occurrence.

Fact 4. The poor are detrimental to society and humanity as a whole.

Conclusions

Fact 1 & Fact 3

We have established that being rich is a matter of proper character being instilled from birth, and we have established that the machinery of the state is poor. This leads to the conclusion that if a child is raised by the machinery of the state, in whole or in part, then the state will instill in them poor values and poor character. This may even affect those children born into poverty who would have been rich by their nature, had they not been raised by at least one poor ‘parent’; the machinery of the state. There is one way in which the state can be a ‘good’ parent to those children born to few resources- to demonstrate character and rich decision-making, rich ideas, and the rich strength of moral clarity which enables a strong state to make good economic, defense, and policing decisions.

Conclusion 1: The machinery of the state is a poor parent. The leaders of a state may be a rich parent, in the absence of this poor machinery.

Conclusion 1 & Fact 4

Since the machinery of the state cannot raise a rich child, and since poor people are detrimental to society as a whole, it follows that the machinery of the state is detrimental to society as a whole. This leads us to the startling conclusion that it is a poor idea and ought to be withdrawn, and financial support ought to be replaced with moral leadership. Without true role models to strive towards, rich children born into poverty may become poor; and no amount of intervention from the machinery of the state can induce a poor child born into poverty to become rich.

Conclusion 1a: The machinery of the state should cease to financially support the poor.

Conclusion 1b: the leadership of the state should support the moral development of the rich in poverty.

Conclusion 1 & Fact 2

We have established that the machinery of the state is a poor parent, and we know that education cannot change a poor child into a rich one. This leads us to the conclusion that forcing education on the poor does nothing to improve their chances of becoming rich. There are certainly success stories of rich people born into poverty who utilized a free education, as they utilized every meagre advantage they had, to become successful and wealthy people; but this is not a success of education. This is a success of the drive and tenacity of the naturally rich.

Conclusion 2: Free education cannot make a rich person from a poor one.

Conclusion 2 & Conclusion 1a

Free education being useless in the development of the rich, and wasteful in the attempted development of the poor, it ought to be abolished on the grounds that it does not assist either the individual or society at large become richer.

Conclusion 2a: Free education ought to be abolished.

Conclusion 1a & Conclusion 2a

These together show that free education ought not be established as a ‘right’, since it does not improve individual outcomes or societal outcomes in terms of moving from a poor society to a rich one. This can be extended to other forms of universal ‘welfare’, or movements towards it- free healthcare ought not be attempted, free voting should be re-examined, free support once one is of no use to society needs to be removed. Charitable awards should never be made available based on need; rather, they should be awarded based on merit.

Conclusion 3: There should be no universal, free support of any kind available.

Conclusion 3 and Fact 4

Without free support from charity or the machinery of state, the poor will resort to their age-old cry of ‘It’s Not Fair.’ And these poor, maybe hiding the diamonds in the rough of the rich in poverty, will attempt to wrest back control by the remaining options they have to them; violence, and the vote. With these removed, the unfairness of the world- starvation, disease, the cruelty of all men in need- these will winnow out the chaff of those in poverty, remove the poor, and leave us with only the rich after a certain amount of time has passed.

Conclusion 4: The poor should be allowed to die as nature intended.

Actions

A note- these actions may appear inhumane, and I admit they are a sketch of a plan, lacking fine detail. It is my great hope that they can be discussed and formalized as time goes on. Remember that ‘Inhumanity’ is simply another poor idea- the idea that one is born deserving to be treated a certain way simply because one exists, rather than because one has earned one’s place in society.

The Newgenic 10-point plan is a means of removing decision-making power from the poor by virtue of allowing them the early, natural deaths that God has planned for them.

1: Increase police powers.

This is a necessary foundation for future steps. Increasing police powers by fiat may create enormous protest and remove necessary lawmakers from positions of power. The best way I can see forward for this is to increase the power and number of tools and weapons available to the police, and to normalize the use of enormous necessary force buy police departments.

2: Restrict voting powers.

Again, removing voting powers by fiat creates violent process. Instead, frame this as the protection of the voting process. Create, publicize and exaggerate voting fraud problems, each of which is to be blamed on a specific section of the poor, and demand more and more paperwork to earn one’s vote. The poor will not bother jumping through the hoops; the rich will. Over time, raise the voting age to 30, state by state. Since this Newgenic plan will cause the poor to die naturally, there will be far fewer poor voters by this age.

3: Privatize healthcare entirely.

The failure of any universal or universal-style free healthcare can be easily engineered by cutting funding slowly in real terms (as in the UK) until the system disintegrates under its own weight, or allowing more private work to be performed by public doctors. The removal of free access to Emergency Rooms would be protested, but the closing of individual ERs one at a time will only be protested on a local level and can be handled by local police.

4: Privatize education entirely.

Move private money and businesses into positions of authority over schools. Create easy-to-reach boundaries of behaviour for exclusion and expulsion of students. Offer new free places that are hard to reach or otherwise unsuitable for students. Allow the creation of for-profit schools, wait for children to move in, and then slowly remove funding. Close ‘unpopular’ public schools. Allow public schools to fundraise from parents in any way they see fit; especially defend ‘discriminatory’ practices that allow parents to pay for perks as a form of free speech.

5. Privatize pensions and social security entirely.

Encourage people to save for their own retirement; the poor are owed nothing simply due to their age. Encourage a mindset of ‘knowing when one’s time is through’ and emphasize the rich leadership of those working well into their old age. Combine this with liberalizing access to drugs to assist the disabled and infirm in controlling how much they drain society.

6: Restrict emergency calls with ID laws

Preventing people from calling emergency services means more poor people will die in natural fires, crimes and health emergencies (which will be more common due to reduced overall healthcare). Police need to follow up on ‘nuisance’ calls from people refusing to give their ID when calling in an emergency. This can eventually be linked to tax- if you don’t pay, you don’t get the emergency services.

7: Encourage obvious solutions to these ‘problems’

By making low-paying work easily available, on national monuments or defence, when poor people refuse to take this work they can easily be personally blamed for their failure to work (or failure to organize their finances if they do work)

8: Allow the natural world to take its course. Reject systemic causes; emphasize individual responsibility.

When poor people- even poor children- die due to being poor, this must be emphasized. Were they rich, they would have found a way to access the support they needed. Since they did not, it is an example of the failure of motivation present in the poor.

9: Encourage the rich away from sympathy and towards acceptance via targeted support as opposed to universal charity.

From prominent rich philanthropists down, the emphasis of their philanthropy must be ‘helping you help yourself’. The ‘Give a man a fish’ proverb is especially useful in encouraging the rich to reconsider meaningless redistribution of wealth; the only lives that will be lost are those of the poor, and that makes our whole society stronger.

10: Patience.

This is not an overnight solution. The eugenic solutions of the past failed for two reasons- they wanted results too quickly, and they were based on racist, sexist, outmoded understandings of what made a person worthwhile. There is no genetic component to being rich or poor; it is a part of the mind that may never be pinned down to a gene. Instead of mass sterilizations, the Newgenic plan is simply allow the poor to die young, raise the voting age to disenfranchise them, and remove the ability to protest without fear of personal death or lasting injury. This will, within 2-3 generations, create a land ruled by and for the deserving rich, whether those success stories that rise from the teeming masses of the poor, or the children of the rich born into a community of moral purity.

#fiction #speculative fiction #politics #us politics #satire #sf #news from the future #newsfromthefuture

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logothanatos · 7 years

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A Generalized Reaction to the "Science" of the Google Memo

The Conservative Bias of Exclusive Research Interest in Synchronic Rather than Diachronic Group Differences

First of all, why are we still prioritizing the discovery of synchronic gender differences over diachronic gender differences? Even if these differences have an inextricable biological dimension, and this dimension can explain behavioral predilections or preferences (even by significant gaps), it is nonetheless the case that phenotypes themselves are subject to social selection and that social selection mediates access to environmental factors that may prime preferences and predilections. The access to resources for phenotypic expression are both technically and socially mediated. The complexity is such that we can even treat susceptibility to large alterations in outcomes based on the presence or absence of an environmental trigger as itself a trait that can itself be selected for, both in the biological sense of natural selection and in the social sense (that may correlate with traits such as resilience). And in terms of social selection at least, we would imagine that there would be a bias towards selecting those more indifferent to environmental triggers than less in an over-all high-stress, highly-competitive status-seeking social environment.

This means the allocation of individuals to different social spaces is likely to make biology salient in any study where the "environment" is treated as homogeneous. Not because the biology has a generalizable significant contribution to trait differences, particularly in short-term time frames, but instead because, in a sense, we actively albeit unwittingly "choose" to give biological characteristics perceived as discrete and localizable importance, particularly as we use them for proxies of other things or associate them with other things. Note that in the literature, when the relative homogeneity or heterogeneity of "environment" is mentioned, it does not often actually include the social bonds formed amongst the given population but quantitatively common static technical and geoecological background features across individuals in the population. This itself is a philosophically narrow understanding of environment--it never occurs to anyone why such a narrow definition of environment is actually pertinent to the larger nature/nurture debate given it excludes in advance features that may be seen as key parts of environment, or views which argue the term "environment" carries largely contextual meanings that require some sort of synthesis.

The Suspicious Conflation Between Biological Influence and Agential Responsibility

Biological causes for social phenomena are being mistakenly used to erase agency here. If biology were intractable, neither evolution nor development would be a thing in biology. This is why it tends to be normatively irrelevant. The real question that is far more complicated is whether we are using our agency as, say, "autonomous biological units," in fair ways, and this cannot be settled by merely treating differences in preferences or disposition as localizable and atomized and disconnected from each other, whether biologically or socially. The task of biological science should be limited to telling us what trade-offs we might expect in the short-term v. long-term in the sorts of changes we would like. The only point I agree with throughout this debacle is that expecting perfect gender parity (even gender-proportionate gender parity if across diverse social spaces) is unrealistic, esp. if seen as a permanent goal that has more priority over other issues. Some who support the Google memo have noted that gender discrimination, hostility, or tension can itself be a cause of rather than an effect of disparity. This seems to acknowledge sociological factors, except it doesn't because there seems to be a dichotomy regarding the causal direction. If indeed a lack of parity can cause disproportionate sexism, and disproportionate sexism can, aggregately, contribute to mass exodus from a field, then it is reasonable to assume there is a third variable that is more largely causally relevant. What triggers this seemingly circular causal relation, given its susceptible to infinite regression? What is this third variable? Culture--that is, symbolic-material communication that analogically underpins biology as much as society--and/or political ecology/economy! Culture is not simply the reaction people have to things (such that "culture" on one side here is the internal masculinized culture of the work space that can lead to disproportionate experiences of sexism, and "biology" is the preferences supposedly leading to the gender disparities)--culture is the whole pattern of action-reaction that we abstractly define in terms of norms and values regulating individual's conduct with each other. Now to get to the meat of what I find problematic about the science here.

The Major Flaw in All Scientific Studies Which try to Segregate Biological and Environmental Causes in Order to Make a Significant Claim Regarding the Intrinsic or Extrinsic Nature of a Trait

Perhaps a major flaw in these studies is always going to be the attempt to correct for sociological factors--the simple reason being that measures of sociological factors such as gender equity and gender egalitarianism cannot be operationalized without ignoring controversies surrounding what they effectively behaviorally entail. A lot of people arguing this seem to assume the normative conclusions that can be drawn from the science are straight-forward--this is simply not true given how we categorize social things (say, as gender equity or egalitarianism) in particular is highly dependent in advance on our normative model of society. That is, a study that is trying to draw conclusions about what gender equality ought to look like by having already taken for granted what "gender equality" looks like behaviorally isn't going to get very far. The studies require that we accept, then, this assumption that what is being corrected for unambiguously counts under these categories, so that the more statistical facts count towards a further normative conclusion. This is exactly why this is so controversial, and people keep discussing the data rather than its normative underpinnings. In the spirit of doing precisely otherwise, notice that all these studies rely on a liberal notion of equality that is primarily based on meritocratic juridical-legal interpretations of equal access to opportunity. The notion of "equity" is also fraught in that it assumes fairness and impartiality in the social selection process that is entangled with just-world meritocratic notions as a paradigm of equity (e.g., hence the sense that resoruce distribution is correct because given to the "deserving"), which seems to ignore that an impartial and fair selection process still may reproduce largely unequal starting places (and thus inequality of opportunity). And this is not necessarily always clearly compensated for through the welfare state (and even when it is, this corrective act presupposes precisely a lack of equity and equality in need of continual [even if not escalating] correction). This is literally one of the key arguments against meritocracy--just like capitalism is a system of capital accumulation, meritocracy is a system of "genetic asset" concentration into or by relatively insular social groups which is particularly a problem in a society with high wealth stratification, high status-seeking competition, artificial scarcity, ghettoization, etc.. It is especially a problem most importantly in the presence of power differentials (as the cultural gatekeepers' process of social selection begins to have undue importance to life outcomes across the board, since they stand in the way of not only access to the social group but to the resources necessary to attempt building the traits required by the group in the first place!). What's the relevance?

Well, a study of gender differences may well have accounted for income inequality or wealth stratification, but insofar as lessened income inequality and wealth stratification is because of State redistribution efforts or State employment and not a fundamental cessation of the aforementioned dynamic tendency, it does not cease the feedback loops involved in differing in-group culture between the sexes that affects receptivity to certain activities (as active interests, even for males, have a strong component of social feedback, perceived shared values, and/or openness to different aesthetic and organizational values) and it also also doesn't cease the self-fulfilling prophesy involved in gender polarization. In fact, we would expect the gender differences in "preference" to grow, because the sort of equity or egalitarianism we're talking about may simply protect women from the economic effects of taking lower-status work (e.g., State making up for loss in wages, etc.) without also threatening the male workplace culture that is a gatekeeper to this more high-paying sector of the labor market. Basically, the costs to being an asshole are the same if not lower in male-dominated fields, and women may be less willing to directly contest this given they can switch fields while having a social net to cushion them if the pay is low or working hours long. Indeed, mix this with two other factors, artificial scarcity (no, "equal opportunity" does not fix this problem) & excessive specialization, and the gap in gender differences is even further widened. That liberal egalitarian/equitable policies don't cease these differences--and that they may in fact exacerbate it--need not be explained in biological terms (tho we can draw a biological story). These liberal legal-juridical policies are insufficient to address gender differences even if they are fair, if the system as a whole unfairly incapacitates different groups of people from creating their own effective and sustainable social spaces by which to define the culture characterizing the process of production and management. In this case, there may remain gendered personality differences that may have a partially biological basis, but without any baring on its own on "preferences" in the grand scheme of things (the author of the Google memo is, after all, arguing biological personality and interest differences exist such that they would impede on "preference"). A positive liberty notion of freedom of association is key as something one would want to track in this sort of study in group differences in personality and interests, it would seem to me.

After all, what do you think a "preference" is, and how does one prove the presence of a preference? It can't just be that women choose divergent paths along gender because they have the flexibility or opportunity to do so--how do we know choices ever reflect actual preferences? Are professed preferences more real than acted-on preferences or vice versa? Do individual or discrete preferences have effects on observed or chosen behavior independent of other preferences? Whether or not gender (in its biological or social dimensions) has an effect on preferences, could it be isolated from other identity dimensions' possible effects on preferences such that we can single out gender differences in the field as what mostly accounts for a lack of parity (it seems not--if the effect is compounded by a class difference [female / male pay gap] that gets reproduced and is more environmental than biological, how can we be sure it doesn't swamp the effects of gender differences on parity across the division of labor [after all, a lot of these studies track gender egalitarianism, and not anything else that contribute to differences in the sexes, so it is often in fact not corrected for--even political elitism is not corrected for])? "Preferences" (if defined as any choice or activity given committed priority against some other) are instead determined by a confluence of overlapping selection processes and the clustering of disparate traits that may seem to be largely unrelated but affect the social experience and function of partaking in some activity (in having a preference) in interaction with others of diverse genotype. If we define a preference more specifically as something one chooses under "free" conditions, then, while operationalized, it's not particularly meaningful to debate whether this is a preference or not without a notion of what counts as a "free condition." And in addition, even if that question is settled, its still a mistake to to treat preferences as functionally isolated from each other. If anything, these continual debates just reminds me that we need a biology whose primary unit is the function rather than the genotypes or even the phenotypes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, studies that try to disprove social theories of gender difference while simultaneously proving biological theories of gender differences seem to have a tendency to interpret the dichotomy as a theory of the extrinsic nature of the gender differences versus a theory of the intrinsic nature of gender differences. After all, that is why proving their hypothesis forces them to work within a false dichotomy that frames the possible interpretations of the data. The issue of accounting for sociological factors is thereby almost always oversimplified. Just think about the mostly laughable notion that it makes scientific sense to plot gender egalitarianism in linear terms as well as implicitly treat it as necessarily equivalent to gender liberality in all factual circumstances. What people miss is that whether a trait is intrinsic or extrinsic is not even an empirical question and has nothing to do with environment v. genetics, biology v. society, or nature v. nurture. These latter questions are transmutations of the former question that arose with the development of distinct metaphysical schools of natural philosophy into science. Nonetheless whether one holds traits to be intrinsic or extrinsic is likely going to affect one’s perception such that one will favor one narrative mode than the other (i.e., a biological or sociological narrative). This is simply due to the fact that one associates that which is most proximate and embedded within the anatomy and physiology of the body as congruent with the self than things otherwise--an unjustified assumption. Yet most recent science (in developmental biology and in epigenetics) has already shown this dichotomy of gene causality v. environmental causality to be largely silly, and at best only heuristically useful under limited circumstances, such that a reduction of self to the body is suspect.

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makingscipub · 6 years

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Blueprint, a broken metaphor?

Three things came together that made me write this post: observing an increased discussion of the blueprint metaphor in genetics and genomics around the publication of a book called Blueprint, reading an old article by George Gamow, and reading a footnote in a forthcoming book by Philip Ball entitled How to Build a Human.

The blueprint metaphor

The blueprint metaphor has been used in genetics and genomics for a long time. It emerged from mapping aspects of ‘a photographic print composed of white lines on a blue background, used chiefly in copying plans, machine drawings’ onto more abstract phenomena like ‘stories’, ‘organisations’ and even ‘genes’. Blueprint can therefore now be used to mean ‘something which acts as a plan, model, or template’ (Oxford English Dictionary), as for example in the phrase ‘genetic blueprint’. There is a problem with this mapping though, as it mostly conjures up the unproblematic creation, indeed ‘construction’, of a phenotype from a genotype or a linear link between a gene and a trait or function.

The costs and benefits of this metaphor have been discussed since at least the 1990s, when some social scientists argued that it framed a vision of genes and genomes that was too deterministic, while others pointed out that ordinary people might understand it in a more nuanced way.

Over time, developments in genomic science have repeatedly undermined notions of determinism. This meant that the blueprint metaphor lost its lustre and science communicators were told to avoid it because it is outdated. As Claire Ainsworth said in 2015, “[a]sk me what a genome is, and I, like many science writers, might mutter about it being the genetic blueprint of a living creature. But then I’ll confess that ‘blueprint’ is a lousy metaphor since it implies that the genome is two-dimensional, prescriptive and unresponsive.”

However, determinism has reared its head again and with it the blueprint metaphor. This was in the shape of a book by the psychologist and geneticist Robert Plomin entitled Blueprint (October, 2018) with the provocative subtitle: How DNA makes us who we are. In the Prologue to the book he states no less provocatively: “This DNA fortune teller is the culmination of a century of genetic research investigating what makes us who we are.” So there we have it again: DNA determines who we are. Of course, this is not quite what he says in the book as many people have pointed out. But that doesn’t distract from the fact of the book’s title implies it.

Even before the publication of this book, the blueprint metaphor provoked some discussion on twitter. I shall reproduce this twitter critique here, as it summarises nicely what scientists think is wrong with this metaphor, before turning my attention to an older, but forgotten, version of the blueprint metaphor which might be less contentious than its ‘modern’ version.

I’ll argue that the blueprint metaphor has two incarnations. While one gives a much distorted vision of the power of DNA, the other might provide a better understanding of how genes actually ‘work’, i.e. do their job in the cell. One is grandiose and wrong, the other workaday and quite helpful.

Given that genomic science, unlike its popular image, has embraced complexity, flexibility and even randomness and chance, one can ask, as Jon Turney did in a chapter for a book I co-edited: “How can language and indeed metaphor start to reflect this more fragmented, complex and context-dependent view of genes, which focuses no longer on what genes are but rather asks what they do within a biological system that changes and develops over time?” (Turney, 2009). This is a big question, which needs more than a blog post.

In the following I first report on a critique of the blueprint metaphor used to frame what genes or genomes ARE; second, I report on how the metaphor was used to frame what genes DO inside cells.

Genes are not blueprints

In July this year Simon E. Fisher wrote a long ‘thread’ on twitter explaining what’s wrong with the blueprint metaphor. Simon is an expert on language and genetics. I shall reproduce his ‘thread’ as a text here, with some paragraph throws thrown in and leaving out images of blueprints etc. (but see my featured image).

The ‘title’ of the thread was: “Your genome is not a blueprint. A thread about misleading metaphors in science communication.”

“DNA is often referred to as a ‘blueprint for life’. A blueprint is an architect plan, technical drawing or engineering design. Like a blueprint, DNA contains information to guide construction, in this case of a living organism. Beyond that, the analogy rapidly breaks down. For blueprints, there’s direct 1-to-1 mapping between each element of a design/drawing & its counterpart in the final constructed product.

‘DNA as a blueprint’ implies that individual genes show 1-to-1 mapping with different parts of a body and/or its functions. Not so. Many genes encode proteins. Their linear DNA sequence carries info for stringing together amino-acids (out of 20 different ones) in a particular order. This order determines how the string folds into a 3D shape. The shape determines the functions the protein carries out.

Your genome contains 20,000 protein-coding genes, with diverse roles; enzymes, hormones, receptors, structural proteins etc. They work together in complex networks, building & maintaining a living body of a myriad distinct cell types, with different genes switched on/off.

Molecular networks include genes that build proteins which regulate activity of other genes. Even hub genes don’t show 1-to-1 mapping to tissue/organism outcomes e.g. the PAX6 gene doesn’t direct eye development by itself & it also plays multiple other roles in the body.

Unlike a blueprint, we can’t reverse engineer a genome from the appearance of an organism or the organisation of its tissues, however exquisitely we examine it. (Cells carry their own copies of the genome & so we can directly access the DNA, but that’s a different issue.) Why isn’t reverse engineering feasible? Because genomes guide the building of bodies through networks of gene activity interacting with other intrinsic & external factors via developmental cascades.” (Here reference is made to the new book by Kevin Mitchell: INNATE].

Overall then, Simon comes to the conclusion that “the blueprint metaphor has almost no explanatory value & is eerily reminiscent of the homunculus fallacy in accounts of vision. (There’s no little person in your brain looking at patterns of light on your retina; & that would lead to an infinite regress.).”

As Massimo Pigliucci said in his blog Footnotes to Plato (in a post from 2017): “the blueprint metaphor is untenable and in fact positively misleading, and should be replaced by the concept of developmental encoding”. Whatever that may mean…

So what to do? In the last part of his thread, Simon Fisher suggests something that rather is difficult to do:

“Maybe, here we should move away from metaphors & just try to tell it as it is. The reach of genetics is extending into many walks of life with potential impact on disease, health, society & education. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to communicate principles of gene coding to broad audiences in an accessible way, while avoiding broken metaphors.”

But is that metaphor really ‘broken’, especially when we think about protein-coding genes which, according to Simon, “work together in complex networks, building & maintaining a living body of a myriad distinct cell types, with different genes switched on/off”.

Blueprint as an overarching big metaphor should be declared dead. But there are uses of the blueprint metaphor at a smaller scale that might still be useful, especially when it’s used to explain what goes on in a human cell, that is, what genes do, rather than what genes are.

Genes are blueprints

Recently, I was trying to find some information about the influence of cybernetics on genomics, as that influence might pick up more dynamic aspects of what genes/genomes do, rather than what they are. Re-reading Matthew Cobb’s book Life’s Greatest Secret, I stumbled across this paragraph “[a]lthough Gamow did attend a 1956 conference on information theory in biology, there were no direct interactions of any significance with scientists working in either cybernetics or information theory, with the exception of von Neumann.” (p. 119). I became interested in Gamow.

Wikipedia says: “In 1953, Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin discovered the double helix structure of the DNA macromolecule. Gamow attempted to solve the problem of how the ordering of four different bases (adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine) in DNA chains might control the synthesis of proteins from their constituent amino acids”.

In 1955 George Gamow published an article in Scientific American entitled “Information transfer in the living cell” and said: “The nucleus of a living cell is a storehouse of information.” (p. xx)

What is more, he linked information theory to emerging work on cellular automata and said that a cell was “a self-activating transmitter which passes on very precise messages that direct the construction of identical new cells.” (p. xx) How does this construction work?

It’s here that ‘blueprints’ come in. It should be stressed however that at the time the mechanisms of protein synthesis (coding) were still quite mysterious. So metaphors were all there was, plus advances in computing, cybernetics and information theory, of course. Gamow wrote:

“Comparing a living cell with a factory, we can consider its nucleus as the manager’s office and the chromosomes as the filing cabinets where all the production plans and blueprints are storied. The main body of the cell, its cytoplasm, corresponds to the factory area where workers are manufacturing the specified product from incoming raw materials. The workers in a living cell are known as enzymes. They extract energy from the incoming food, break down the food molecules and assemble the separated units into various complex compounds needed for the growth and well-being of the organism.” (Gamow, 1955: 70, emphasis mine)

Here blueprints are not blueprints with a big B, so to speak, they don’t specify a whole organism or a human’s ‘destiny’! These are blueprints with a small b, part of the working ‘machinery’ of a cell. Their work is intricately linked to the information they convey. That in turn leads to questions about the ‘language of genes’, a language that was only just being understood by people like Crick, Watson, Franklin and many others.

“The information in the chromosome blueprints must be communicated to the working enzymes. How is the DNA language of the chromosomes translated into the protein language of the enzymes? What mathematical trick makes it possible to transform a message represented by a sequence using four symbols into one using 20 symbols?” (pp. 72-73, emphasis mine)

As Bradon Smith said in an article on metaphors in genetics: “It is interesting to notice the way in which in this passage the word ‘translation’ acts as a metaphoric hinge: the metaphor of a digital, number system shifts, via the concept of translation, to a metaphor of language – a protein ‘word’ formed of amino acid ‘letters’. The code metaphor, then, morphs into the language metaphor, especially in the immediate aftermath of Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA in 1953.” There is another blog post in there!

On the whole Gamow’s article based on the code and language metaphor of ‘life’. But it also exploits a metaphor based on something Gamow loved, namely: card games. Lily Kay in Who Wrote the Book of Life calls it the cardgame of life metaphor. The blueprint metaphor links up with all of these other grander metaphors as well as with this smaller one.

“Suppose that each amino acid possesses a special chemical affinity for a certain triplet of nucleotides; that is, a given letter always tends to associate itself with a certain hand – a with three hearts, b with three diamonds and so on. Then the order of the nucleotides in a DNA molecule will uniquely determine the order of the amino acids in the protein built according to its blueprint.” (p. 74, emphasis mine)

My final quote from Gamow’s article is the most interesting perhaps, as he uses it as a verb, thereby stressing the dynamic nature of the blueprint metaphor with a small b, which contrast with the rather static one of the blueprint metaphor with a big B.

“Similarly in a living organism over eons of time the random mutations may once in a great while produce a sequence of nucleotides which blueprints a new and helpful enzyme. A lizard living in the age of reptiles may thus have acquired an enzyme which catalysed the production of mile – and so taken the first step toward the age of mammals.” (p. 78, emphasis mine)

Responsible Language Use

In its most popular use, the metaphor of the blueprint is misleading, as it jumps from genes straight to the whole organism, hiding all the dynamic work that goes into this construction. There are, as Simon Fisher has said, multiple interacting networks at work, there is development over time, there is dynamic and context-dependent folding and unfolding etc.

All this time cells are hard at work behind the scenes ‘blueprinting’. In this context the much less popular blueprint metaphor is perhaps still useful as it helps us understand what genes do, rather than what they are in a grand but delusional vision of life. Keeping this in mind, it might be a good idea to tear up only one blueprint while making careful use of the other.

Overall then, we should not use the blueprint metaphor just because it is there, as that only entrenches a wrong view of what genes and genomes are and what they do, something that should be avoided at a time when more and more people have to think about their genes and genomes. This is a question of what I have called ‘responsible language use’, something just as important as responsible innovation! Whether telling things as they are is an option, is another question.

Epilogue – gene editing babies

I had just finished drafting this blog post when it was announced that a Chinese team of researchers had gene edited babies. If this story turns out to be true, it will be huge. One announcement said: “A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.” (emphasis mine)

Discuss!

Image: Architectural drawing, 1902, Adrian Michael Wikipedia

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youvegotcrabs · 7 years

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1/27/2018

I made a keen observation in the shower - scratching one’s hydrated buttcrack sounds similar to tooth-brushing.

About two days ago I was thinking about the nature of selfishness in humans. It’s definitely somewhat in-character when surviving and reproducing seems to be the ultimate goal - birds gotta eat fish, fish gotta pretend to be rocks and release neurotoxins into unsuspecting feet. But since we’re apparently real social, it makes sense somewhat for the individual to sacrifice some of its needs for the group to keep the population going on and continue our species as a whole. Ethics are tricky because they’re a human creation - you can thank Christianity for setting an ethical foundation most people can groove with, at least here in the crowded west. We’ve set up an interesting judicial system and we could do another post on that, but today let’s go more onto general ethics. This is a whole lot of me throwing theories around because I’m a big-browed troglodyte who can’t be arsed to read any studies in the subject - if you’re one of those smart bendy-thumb folks feel free to drop articles on me, I’ll be jazzed. Anyhow, the main question is whether humans have an underlying sense of morality or if that’s just kind of subtly indoctrinated at an early age. If it’s both, then to what extent? There’s a general favouritism towards altruism - it’s good to donate to charity, even if it’s a publicity thing. (Ends/means thing is another tricky road we’ll avoid today.) The possibility of one’s satisfication towards another’s altruism might be rooted in something more selfish isn’t lost - there might be some underlying currents that suggest that the altruist is weak or easily-manipulated. Selfishness, on the other hand, is a gray area. Killing someone because they parked in your spot is selfish, if not indicative of some kind of mental trauma. Killing someone because they killed your daughter is still selfish, but may be interpreted as a lesser variant. Of course, many people find murder completely reprehensible regardless of the (potentially interesting) circumstances, as depriving somebody else of their life (without consent?) is among the most selfish thing one could perform. I keep thinking back to a photograph - a Pulitzer-winning shot of a malnourished Sudanese child on the ground, with a vulture close by. There’s a bit of controversy over the photo - it took Carter 20~ minutes to get the shot before shooing the vulture away and the status of the child afterward is unknown. You could claim that Carter helped raise awareness of the conditions in Sudan to millions of people which outweighs the life of a single child but someone had to be there and pull the shutter. (my photography knowledge is blinding, i know.) I guess I’d be remiss not to mention Carter’s death afterward - he huffed some CO and wrote a note.

“I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain... of starving or wounded children...”

I’m not going to claim this happened solely from guilt over the child - there was plenty of other shit going on in his life that paints an awful wrong picture. Journalism in general’s a pretty hairy business if Nightcrawler is anything to go by. The compulsion, the drive toward one’s personal pursuits - art in particular, can verge on the extreme. There’s the general praise for creating art for others to enjoy, but also a darker area of concern behind the means of creation. The artist is engulfed by the self and could spend days locked away in a dimly-lit studio, scraping away with the lingering scent of lead paint enveloping the room. The artist could be neglecting friends, bills, and the tethers that root them to society. What drives man to create is valued as an extraordinary trait that pushes us beyond animals. I pointed out an extreme case, but there’s always a touch of selfishness in creation. This selfishness often transcends morality, but there’s an argument to be made that that may too be caused by environmental influence. I suppose a human is no less malleable than a rat or a wad of clay, though there’s a bit of intrinsic selfishness in sapience. Humans are certainly capable of extreme selfishness, but your average joseph seems pretty alright to me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some tissue mist to order.

#selfish #selfishness #self #selfie #beyourself #shesellssoughtselvesbytheseacellar #kevincarter #art #crabs #butthygiene #noseriouslytryit

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kristinsimmons · 4 years

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The False Choice Between Science And Economics

By DAVID SHAYWITZ

This is not an environment conducive to understanding exactly what’s going on at a system-wide level, let alone a molecular one.

And even if this potential is not realized either universally, nor as frequently as we might wish, it’s still the best construct we have.

It beats, for instance, hoping that a disease will simply disappear, like a miracle. Hope is not a method.

No individual or organization should be so revered that their findings are beyond scrutiny or evaluation, whether he or she works for a drug company, an academic institution, or an NGO.

And that’s because it is.

The good news is that Trump has a real opportunity in the coming days to leverage the advice of both scientists and policy makers, should he choose to listen.

Translation: For the foreseeable future, almost all of us are vulnerable. And we will remain vulnerable until therapies emerge.

David Shaywitz, a physician-scientist, is the founder of Astounding HealthTech, a Silicon Valley advisory service, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article originally appeared on The Bulwark here.

The post The False Choice Between Science And Economics appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

The False Choice Between Science And Economics published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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PETER MAYLE WROTE ONE CALLED WHY ARE WE GETTING A DIVORCE

Within companies there were powerful forces pushing people toward a single model of how kids are supposed to be an instant success, like YouTube or Facebook. Some of our competitors used C and C: Perl, Python, and Ruby. A big company that uses Suns is not interested in saving money and can safely be charged more. Most people, most of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and so must people trying to write systems software on multi-cpu computers. If they aren't an X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary beliefs and customs? If you wanted to create a silicon valley in Germany, because you need more of them to ask if this was so. I did know about that, but probably hurts. The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat the foods that people in the 1950s and 60s had been even more conformist than us.

Many of the big companies paid their best people less than market price. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many configuration files and settings. It was an artifact of limitations imposed by old technology. American university and removed the Jews, you'd have some pretty big gaps. It seems likely that something similar happened in exit polls this year. Users should not have to do it well or they can be swapped out for another supplier. But if you work hard and incrementally make it better, there is a downside here, it is likely to lead, because they only have themselves to be mad at. In Smalltalk the code is a sign, to me at least, but less bold. One day, we'd think of ourselves as the next generation of software? When it was first developed, Lisp embodied nine new ideas. The problem is not the usual one, which applies even when you know which basket is best. When it got big enough, IBM decided it was worth paying attention to.

We arrive at adulthood you get a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to run the world? One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger, no matter where you are. As one data point on the curve, at any rate, if you have code for noticing errors built into your application.1 VCs, but the dumb joke. No one who voted for Kerry felt virtuous for doing so, and were eager to tell pollsters they had. Desktop software forces users to become system administrators. The specific thing that surprised me is how one's perspective on time shifts. I mean a couple hours later. One of the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; if you wanted to compare the quality of links on the frontpage of HN hasn't changed much, the quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat. And that means other questions aren't.2

If they can, which is at least a precedent. What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. At Viaweb, software included fairly big applications that users talked to directly, programs that tried to restart things if they broke, programs that those programs used, programs that those programs used, programs that ran constantly in the background looking for problems, programs that those programs used, programs that tried to restart things if they broke, programs that pretended to be users to measure performance or expose bugs, programs for doing backups, interfaces to outside services, software that you can use from any browser will be enough of a win in itself to outweigh any awkwardness in the UI. Web-based application. It's surprising how much you can take. By the time we were bought by Yahoo, the customer support people liked it because they could reproduce bugs instead of just hearing vague second-hand reports about them. That might be worth exploring. So what if some of the best hackers I know are professors, but it is quite true. As an illustration of what I mean about the relative power of programming languages, consider the following problem. Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of a certain size.

I was in high school have seen it. Work. The immense value of the peer group of YC companies, and I was even more convinced of it after hearing it confirmed by Hilbert. Over-engineering is poison. Some amount of piracy is to the advantage of software will be less and less pressure to use what are perceived as standard technologies. So if you want to keep them innocent. At this point he is committed to fight to the death.

But plenty of projects are not demanding at all. My second suggestion will seem shocking to VCs: let founders cash out partially in the Series A round. There was no Internet then.3 SUVs. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. Then one day we had the idea of her having sex even if there were zero risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. And you know what?

For all practical purposes, succeeding now equals getting bought. Amazingly, no one will dominate server-based software will be reusable. I'd say it's hard to say whether the problem is more than 10x cheaper than ten, because a lot of kids grow up feeling it's part of their identity to be honest and industrious. This is my attitude to the site where it's offered. And if you can see your email, why not your calendar? With server-based software is offered through ISPs acting as resellers. If you're a hacker who has thought of one day starting a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. User behavior turns out to have selfish advantages. Even when there were still plenty of Neanderthals, it must have sucked to be one-directional: support people who hear about bugs fill out some form that eventually gets passed on possibly via QA to programmers, who put it on their list of things to do.4 In a job there is much more successful than Hacker News.

Notes

Einstein, Princeton University Press, 1981. Though you should prevent your beliefs about its intrinsic qualities. Type II startups, the more accurate or at least a whole is becoming less fragmented, and a list of where to see artifacts from it, and earns the right order.

Which means it's all the more the type of lie. My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an equity round.

Japanese car companies have little do with the VC knows you well, but that's not true! If someone speaks for the average startup. No one understands female founders better than the 50 minutes they may try allowing up to his house, though it's a bad sign if you suppress variation in wealth in the sample might be a distraction. This is an acceptable excuse, but countless other startups, whose founders aren't sponsored by organizations, and help keep the number of spams that you can't dictate the problem, but definitely monotonically.

In 1800 an empty plastic drink bottle with a walrus mustache and a company that takes on a form that would have. It's sometimes argued that we should, because they can't legitimately ask you a termsheet, particularly if a third party like YC is how much time it filters down to you; you're too busy to feel uncomfortable. 01. Credit card debt is little different from technology companies.

Thanks to Geoff Ralston, Naval Ravikant, Jeremy Hylton, Richard Florida, and Jessica Livingston for sharing their expertise on this topic.

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