The pursuit of #cheppiness

Yet another potentially depressing article on the opioid epidemic in the U.S. – this time in Time Magazine.  It says on average 46 people are dying every day from an overdose, with over 2 million addicted to the deadly painkillers and hundreds of thousands hospitalized for drug abuse every year. Many addicts have taken to shooting as a more efficient drug delivery method, and there have been outbreaks of AIDS and other needle-sharing diseases. So how did it get to this? The article says “it took a tragic combination of good intentions, criminal deception and feckless oversight to turn America’s desire to relieve its pain into such widespread suffering.” The FDA and medical associations trumpeted the benefits of opioid painkillers, and over 20 states passed legislation intended to boost prescriptions. So I was going to say “positivity bias” (a.k.a. "optimism") played a role, too – but perhaps it should not be overestimated. Even after the deadly potential of the drugs had become apparent, the FDA continued to approve ever more potent formulas. And the pharmaceutical companies producing them continued to engage in aggressive marketing practices, occasionally crossing into illegal deception. Their business plans, of course, depended on getting as many customers to use as much of their products as humanly possible. Back in 2012, the libertarian fundamentalists at Reason Online fretted that “the government’s medical meddling hurts pain patients.” Their more recent solution to the “problem”? Let marijuana free!

#Automation is us

Nicholas Carr has another potentially disturbing amendment to “The Glass Cage” on his blog: “Media Takes Command.” Where automation is taking us, indeed! Just two minor qualms: 1) There has never been real “panic about automation” in the US, despite the dire warnings of a few smart “Luddites” – there is too much “positivity bias” around for that. 2) Automation will not just displace some and change the nature of work and the skill sets of others – it is already changing us, and particularly our kids, at the most basic neurosomatic level (this, I thought, was the central idea of the “Google making us stupid” piece – and it must make it easier for humans to be replaced by bots). And it can’t all be for the better – unless my Bulgarian “negativity bias” is way too strong…

#TheEndofSatire, among other things…

“The Rise of Meritocracy” was the title of a British satirical novel that came out in 1958. And you have to pinch yourself occasionally to recall that “The Best and the Brightest” wasn’t coined as a compliment back in 1972. Now it turns out Carry Bradshaw’s exploits started out as satire, too. It’s news to me at least – but it’s hardly a surprise: http://www.greatertalent.com/speaker-news/interview-with-candace-bushnell-in-the-new-york-observer-carrie-ing-the-torch-deep-down-were-all-still-a-little-bit-bradshaw.

"Rachel Dolezal, in Center of Storm, Is Defiant: ‘I Identify as Black’"

The New Yorker saw this coming – or so it seems:

Mechanical man

Saw Ex Machina a few days ago. Was the only viewer in front of a big screen, so at times it felt like I was interviewing Eva (though the flirting part felt less real). It’s a philosophically ambitious movie, meant to provoke some uneasy thoughts. The original Turing test was apparently premised on the idea that a true AI machine should be able to communicate like a real human being. But as humans (or at least a significant subset of humanity) are becoming emotionally number and thus more machine-like, passing the test must seem an increasingly realistic machine task.  Until, indeed, we are “all watched over by machines of loving grace.” And if it is seductive cyborgs vs. psychopathic geeks, it’s really hard not to root for the former. It’s also curious that in the movie the benchmark for AI is defined as the ability to manipulate emotionally another human being. But by this point this should come as little surprise. Even a sitcom like Modern Family that invokes a lost, extended-family-focused mode of living is built around such mutual manipulation. It’s assumed to be, as they say, in the water supply.

To everyone according to her – what?

An article in Pacific Standard, the standard-bearer of pop (social) science, decries “The Hidden Sexism Lurking Behind the Pay Gap.” The teaser beneath clarifies the point: “Let’s stop arguing about how much of the pay gap is due to women’s ‘choices.’ Those choices are often products of sexism hidden from view.” And what is wrong, for that matter, with women – or men, or those adopting any gender-non-conformist self-definitions – not choosing career paths which require mechanical drudgery, manipulating complex algorithms and abstractions, taking incalculable risks with imaginary “investment” vehicles, bossing underlings in the service of ethically dubious ends, etc.? And isn’t the bigger problem hidden in the vastly disparate rewards bestowed by the market upon more and less humane or caring service functions – to the point of sometimes rewarding socially destructive profit maximization? This is, at least, what British liberal theorist Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse was asking 100 years ago – but such utopian musings have now gone the way of openly professed “social Darwinism.” So all that is left is for everyone to get a shot at climbing as high as humanly possible on the existing socioeconomic food-chain – or ladder, if a less laden concept is in order. 

Hearts and minds

Tim Judah has another longer piece on the Ukrainian conflict in the NYRB (“Ukraine: Inside the Deadlock”). A most seasoned war reporter, he this time asks a somewhat naïve question: “It is baffling  … why the Ukrainian government has not sought to win over the easterners by trying to send them its own aid convoys, even if the rebels prevented them from crossing into their territory. To ordinary people in the east it looks like Kiev does not care much about them and considers them the enemy.” Could it be that the volksgeist on both sides includes such communally biased attributions? In any case, this is a predisposition which will forever mystify cosmopolitan intellectuals – who can hardly understand how “weird” their own perspective may seem. Ironically, 100 years ago British observers had no problem understanding such mutual animosities among the squabbling “races” of the Balkans – and Eastern Europe in general.

The illusion of empowerment

The BBC web site carries an article on “placebo buttons” which provide the illusion that those who press them control the operation of doors, traffic lights, thermostats, etc. (“Press Me! The Buttons That Lie to You”). Could planting them seem a bit creepy and manipulative? Perhaps not if, pressing such useless buttons, “people feel happier with the world around them, more in control of events and comforted by the apparent efficacy of their actions.” Some psychologists, however, have pointed to a darker side. The article cites an experiment involving financial traders: some exaggerated how much pressing a button affected the value of financial assets in a game, and they were the ones who tended to take uncalculated risks in real life. This “illusion of control” is heightened under conditions of cut-throat competition, and may operate on a broader scale – a tendency which could perhaps help explain the risky calculations that led to the financial crisis. And how about, one is tempted to ask, invading Iraq and exporting democracy to a historically troubled region? Or launching the Euro and facilitating subprime credit lines to governments? It seems a degree of fatalism may not always be a bad thing – but won’t come easily to the “weirdest people in the world”...

Women’s Liberation 2.0

Anthropology professor Melvin Konner proclaims in The Chronicle Review “The End of Male Supremacy.” The teaser beneath the title clarifies his claim: “Biologically, intellectually, socially, women are the superior gender, and society will increasingly reflect that.”  I am all for that – in fact, it recalls Ashley Montagu’s classic, “The Natural Superiority of Women.” It’s a book which ticks some feminists – but I do occasionally recall it as a most inspiring read. Konner’s treatment of the subject, though, is less sentimental. What does he celebrate exactly? How “millennial male dominance is about to end." And how “glass ceilings are splintering into countless shards of light, and women are climbing male power pyramids in every domain of life” – to a point where entrepreneurship has become “the new women’s movement.” And what, then, happened to the older women’s movement which aimed to dismantle those hated “male power pyramids” and usher in a better world for the meek? It apparently went the away of so many male utopian projects – minus the blood spilled by some male saviors of humanity.

The Atlantic Ocean is half-empty!!

Tonight, I surpassed my own record for uninterrupted TV viewing – 48 minutes (counting from 6:23 p.m. on July 9, 2011, when I joined the “quantified self” revolution). And it was time well spent. In addition to the more political spots I noted earlier, I particularly enjoyed the coverage of the “tide of the century” alongside France’s Atlantic coast. Euronews showed throngs of excited tourists, with some of them sharing on camera their thrill at seeing the sight of a lifetime (technically true, if they would not live past another 18 years or so). And how was the same “story” presented on Bulgaria’s most watched, private TV channel? Apparently, there had been forecasts for 15-meter waves. But the wind had died down, and the mini-tsunami had not materialized – so many tide-watchers had been deeply disappointed.

Soft power outage

Some time ago John Kerry complained RT had acquired too much global influence. For those coming out of hibernation this time of the year, RT is the Russian virtual mammoth Putin has unleashed to spew conspiracy theories and other propaganda in response the Western media’s carefully balanced news coverage. So I decided to check it out. The first segment that came up showed an RT correspondent asking a US state department communicator a simple question: why has the US condemned Russian military exercises within its own territory as destabilizing, while failing to recognize that NATO’s military deployments along Russia’s borders could have the same effect? Instead of giving a simple answer (like: Russia borders Ukraine), the State Department official got into a casuistic argument over what exactly his office had said in response to Russian saber rattling. So how could the free world counter Putin’s propaganda blitz? I was going to say: start by subjecting Sate Department spokespeople to some sort of psychometric test. But this, of course, would be a bit insensitive. So perhaps hire the creative personality that coined the phrase “soft power outage”?

A new science of terrorism – and of everything else, no kidding!!

An op-ed piece on the NYT web site makes the point that the study of terrorism in recent years has apparently been ineffective – as it has not informed policies that could successfully counter the increase in terrorist activity around the globe. The solution? More randomized experiments – as this is the only method which can produce scientifically valid evaluations of the effectiveness of anti-terrosism tactics. So research on terrorism needs to adopt the same approach that has produced such magnificent advances in other areas – where “scientists have identified interventions that effectively prevent problems as diverse as antisocial behavior, depression, schizophrenia, cigarette smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, academic failure, teenage pregnancy, marital discord and poverty.” Of course, some of these problems have not exactly declined either, but such a complaint would probably come across as petty. As I was reading, I was reminded of another op-ed I had looked up a few minutes earlier as it appeared just beneath the pitch for scientific anti-terrorism rigor. Called "If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?," it pointed out that “a shocking amount of what we’re reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms” - and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. To me, the research methodology op-ed surely looked like one - but, if the byline is to be believed, it is written by a human.

Shallow and shallower

Coming back from “Human Capital,” the official Italian entry for the Oscars (and the first one to make me shed real tears in a long time), I looked up a couple of reviews. My verdict? The NYT piece takes to a promising start, but then falls on its face by concluding: “the movie has a third chapter that follows Serena into some messy, rather tedious melodramatic complications and something of a coda that only restates the obvious. It’s all handsomely managed, polished and professional, but the pieces are too neatly manufactured to feel as if anything is truly at stake.” The pitch for the Variety review is similarly clueless: “This slick, stylish fusion of class critique and murder mystery confirms Paolo Virzi as one of Italy's more dynamic directors.” But the title in The Guardian, which still positions itself as socially conscious, is particularly damning – for the critic (“the UK leading film critic,” if the BBC is still to be trusted) rather than for the movie he casually dismisses: “Stylish Yet Shallow Oscar Nominee.” There is much research indicating that our perceptions and ideas reflect to a greater extent how we function mentally and neurosomatically – as opposed to the qualities of external objects and phenomena (an issue I addressed in a recent article, "Out of Touch"; case in point: “the dress”). Which makes me feel for all those movie critics (and others) whom the movie left deeply unmoved. This, of course, in itself must be a sign of the times “Human Capital” sets out to deconstruct – and perhaps the main reason why it has become so hard to imagine a more humane alternative.

Satire will save the world – or at least politics

Dannagal G. Young, assistant professor of communications and professional comedian, has an inspiring cover story in the Columbia Journalism Review. The title says it all: “Lighten Up: How Satire Will Make American Politics Relevant Again.” The rather long piece carries no date, but was apparently typed before Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert decided they needed to break out of their beloved satirical moulds. Young dismisses the usual hand-wringing that their shows have become the central news source for most younger Americans. She concludes: “Increasingly, scholars of political entertainment are challenging the notion that this process is worth protecting from the bastardizing influences of emotion, humor, and fun; especially if rationalizing politics means leaving normal people alienated from the language and rituals of politics. … The key is in finding ways to show citizens that politics is not separate from their lives. Politics is people. People are social, emotional, and playful. We want to connect with our world and with each other, and enjoy doing it.” And when that fails, we may want to engage in wishful thinking – all the better if slightly self-serving.

Planet of the moody bitches

“Moody Bitches” is the, apparently, marketing-driven title of a new book by NYC psychiatrist Julie Holland. A few days ago she published an op-ed in the NYT, “Medicating Women’s Feelings,” timed to land a few days before the book’s release. There, she argues that evolution has designed women to be more sensitive to their environment and to others. They are constantly taught and pressured, however, to suppress their emotional responses – and fed medications to maintain a “new, medicated normal … at odds with women’s dynamic biology.” This new normal may include artificially elevated levels of serotonin – resulting in emotional blunting and stereotypically male inperviousness, self-assurance, and assertiveness (providing, come to think of it, a fix for the “confidence gap” identified by TV personalities Claire Shipman and Katty Kay). While initially it all smacks of a conspiracy theory, at some point in the article things become more ominous.

Survival of the least judged!?

Aeon carries a fascinating article on #epigenetics (“Plastic People”) by Julie Guthman and Becky Mansfield. It highlights the way in which our physical and social environment can shape human bodies and minds across generations. The authors also stress the futility of “seeking biographical solutions to systemic contradictions” (as Ulrich Beck once put it), and call for a shift of focus toward related public policies. In the conclusion, they also suggest researchers and popularizers may be drawing the wrong lesson from epigenetic studies: “at the least, they argue, we ought to be more alike and ever more vigilant about our lifestyles to maintain that normality. More: we ought to strive to be even better – with biomedicine promising to eradicate some of the differences that frighten us.” And the worst case scenario? “A biomedical future in which the perfect human is engineered: thin, smart, outgoing, heterosexual, gender-conforming, lacking physical disabilities, able to sit still and work hard, and (given widespread preference for light skin) white.”

To #Putin – with super little love lost

#GaryShteyngart, the celebrated author of #SuperSadLoveStory, recounts on the NYT site the lessons he learned from a week of binging on Russian TV (“Out of My Mouth Comes Unimpeachable Manly Truth”). One of the highlights in his acerbic account is the way in which Russian programs portray the West as culturally and morally degenerate – which ostensibly leaves #Russia as the only true bastion of spirituality and civilization. No surprise there – but this leaves me mulling the role of some Western cultural skeptics in the new theater of ideological warfare. People like "TheodoreDalrymple, #J.G.Ballard, #ChristopherLash, etc. – who have long decried the alleged social and cultural decadence, cult of personal disinhibition-cum-liberty, and casual non-judgmentalism engulfing their own societies. Or some feminists critical of seemingly pornographic or disempowering scoops on the mass culture market (like the #50shades franchise). Come to think of it, such cultural hedgehogs could similarly be seen as providing ideological fodder not just for Putin’s propaganda machine. They could also be censured as unwitting contributors to the recruitment campaigns of ISIS, al Qaeda, and their smaller siblings and offshoots. Why does everything have to be so super complicated, really?

#God is dead, have fun!

An article on “Soft #Atheism” includes this “humanist” ad from the London tube. Of course, there can be no other logical reason for practicing much inhibition.

Proud to be #Bulgarian!

Law professor William Ian Miller describes oh so beautifully the beauty of living without hope (“May You Have My Luck”).  Reading his piece reminded me of a frequently evoked Bulgarian proverb: “Mnogo dobro ne e na dobro.” Which translates loosely as: “Too much good fortune doesn’t bode well.” And which conveys better than a thousand books and articles Bulgaria’s status as, according to #TheEconomist, the unhappiest place on Earth as proportionate to GDP (“The Rich, the Poor and #Bulgaria”).

Just focus!?

Half a year ago, #MariaKonnikova published some tips on “Being a Better Reader” – citing much authoritative research/opinion to illustrate the depth of the problem. Her takeaway? “Maybe the decline of deep reading isn’t due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention.” Perhaps, but there may be a slight problem with heeding this advice. According to research done by #neuroscientists like Anthony Jack and Matthew Lieberman, the relentless focus needed for non-casual online reading could interfere with the dreamy, “trance-like state of mind” associated with #deepreading (and evoked by #NicholasCarr in “The Dreams of Readers”). 

Do our #gadgets make us stupid?

Apparently not, in neuropsychologist Daniel Willingham’s informed judgment (“Smartphones Don’t Make Us Dumb”). He says being glued to screens for most of our waking hours does not diminish our ability to concentrate – since “mental reorganization at that scale happens over evolutionary time,” not within the lifespan of any individual. Instead, we (and our kids) are losing merely the desire to concentrate as we are lured by endless entertainment opportunities. Prof. Willingham also points to research showing “that the amount of leisure reading hasn’t changed with the advent of the digital age” – and, besides, “brainier hobbies have never been all that popular.” This raises all sorts of interesting questions – is the absence of statistically significant experimental evidence reliable evidence of absence? And what about some studies which contradict Willingham’s statements? Caleb Crain [“Twilight of the Books”], for example, has cited studies showing that “we are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago”; that between 1992 and 2003 the proportion of [American] adults who qualified as proficient readers (who could, for example, compare the viewpoints expressed in two editorials) declined from 15 to 13 percent”; that in the  Netherlands in the mid-1990s, college graduates born after 1969 were reading less than people without a college degree born before 1950; etc. Let’s hope this time the majority neuroscientific opinion is on more solid ground than the near-consensus which produced the assault on dietary fat, for example.

#Narcissism works!

So the DJIA has pushed beyond 18,000. It may not quite get to 30,000 soon, but still – what a momentous achievement! Which reminds me of a remarkable #Colbert interview from March 2009. The guest was #EmilyYoffe who had just published an article on Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Slate. The previous week the Dow Jones had hit rock bottom at 6,547, and Ms. Yoffe explained somewhat sternly that the whole financial meltdown had resulted from Americans “binging on ‘I deserve it.’” After asking a few probing questions, the Colbert character retorted: “But the economy and the market is really all based on confidence. Why don’t we just recapture that narcissism that we had a year ago and pretend that everything is just OK, and won’t the market come right back? Won’t we just rebuild the bubble?” At the time this was meant as a joke, but now the joke is on the non-believers, or should I say – the non-narcissists?

The quiet #Mutti

The way #AngelaMerkel comes through in her lengthy New Yorker profile (“The Quiet German”) can provoke some mischievous thoughts. “She has always been,  ‘in her body language, a bit awkward’” (according to her long-time photographer); found public speaking “visibly painful…, her hands a particular source of trouble” – until “she learned to bring her fingertips together in a diamond shape over her stomach”; but still tends to speak in “toneless” voice, as if “reading out regulatory guidelines for the national rail system”; carries “an orange-red leather handbag that clashes with her jacket”; once worked on quantum chemistry, and still displays a “scientific habit of mind” (approaching “problems methodically” and with “scientific detachment” and empiricism – which makes her a sort of human “computer”); “was physically clumsy” as a child, and “could barely walk downhill without falling” (according to an earlier profile, she was five when she finally learned to come down stairs); looked “colorless,” as she wasn’t interested in clothes or in how her hair looked; her teacher had to “exhort [her] to look up and smile while offering another student a glass of water in Russian”; “is not a woman of strong emotions” (according to a prominent German journalist), and is hard to read due to her “emotional opacity”; doesn’t do well small talk; has “a reputation for accepting little criticism”; the way she stabbed her patron Helmut Kohl in the back “mixed Protestant righteousness with ruthlessness”; “is not from this world” (in the words of along-time political associate); has failed to develop “a fingertip feel for public opinion”; “plainness remains her political signature”; eventually came to appreciate the extent to which she and President Obama “were alike – analytical, cautious, dry-humored, remote.” These characteristics have been mentioned before, and previous articles can add some curious details – for example, about the way Frau Merkel left her first husband quite abruptly, taking away only the fridge from their Spartan apartment. And her eyes can look disturbingly empty in photos. But here the personality profile seems most complete.

Me, myself, and I

Among all the “10 best” lists rolled out before the holidays, the NYT offers a real gem: “The 10 Best Modern Love Columns Ever.” At no. 10 there stands “Somewhere Inside, a Path to #Empathy.” It was written back in 2009 by David Finch, an engineer who tells a most heart-warming story – how his wife, a therapist treating autistic children, diagnosed him with Asperger’s. And then applied unfailing tact and perseverance to bring him out of his mental shell so they could reinvent their faltering marriage. The essay is written with so much self-insight, sensitivity, and sense of humor that the diagnosis seems a bit off the mark.  So #Mr.Finch – unlike his fictional namesake from “Person of Interest” – must have come a long way. As he acknowledges, however, developing a degree of empathy was a hard act – “given that my Aspergerish point of reference is myself in every circumstance.” How about, then, all those economists who – like James Buchanan – believe the notion of a “public interest” or “common good” can’t possibly be real; and even politicians like Clement Attlee or Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir must be pursuing their own, self-referential utility? As John Cassidy once showed in the New Yorker (“After the Blowup”), such cases are mostly untreatable. Or perhaps the French graduate students who at the turn of the century called for a "post-autistic economics" have merely lacked what Mr. Finch's wife had in such plentiful supply.