A crucial insight

Something that maybe eluded me, or at least that I've seen from a different perspective: conservatives of the political and religious stripes simultaneously glorify America / religion while betting on the doom of society that rejects their viewpoints. On the one hand, America is a wonderful place of liberty, by definition, the freedom to pursue happiness in one's own chosen way. On the other hand, America cannot survive the liberal culture and secular "falling away" from religion.

It's an interesting contrast.

As Frank Schaffer says,

The leaders of the new religious right were gleefully betting on American failure. If secular, democratic, diverse and pluralistic America survived, then wouldn’t that prove that we were wrong about God only wanting to bless “Christian America?” If, for instance, crime went down dramatically in New York City, for any other reason than a reformation and revival, wouldn’t that make the prophets of doom look silly? And if the economy was booming without anyone repenting, what did that mean?

Exactly. That's from the religious perspective. I think I've mentioned Schaeffer's "falling away" before.

From the (purely?) political perspective, Sophia McClennen writes,

One of Colbert’s greatest gifts was his ability to expose logical fallacies and faulty reasoning. His second book, “America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t,” epitomized one of the primary flaws in logic to conservative patriotism: How can the United States be the greatest nation ever and also be on the verge of total collapse? Or, as Limbaugh put it in his attack on me: “Meanwhile, we’re losing everything this country’s known for. The culture is rotting away, the culture is corrupting itself away, being perverted away, and all of that’s being celebrated.” Again and again, Colbert showed us that the right had created an almost devotional quality to their version of American exceptionalism, one that could not account for practical realities and one that could not handle any sort of questioning. If you asked about the treatment of Native Americans, then you hated freedom. If you thought that the U.S. should not practice unilateral foreign policy, you were weak. Any time anyone had a different view on these issues they were immediately attacked for “hating” their country. It’s worth pausing to reflect on the very idea of attacking someone for “hating” their country when you disagree politically. How did politics become overrun with hyperbolic emotion? When Colbert began his show, much conservative political discourse had devolved to highly emotional language. There is no question that a degree of affect and emotion is a part of politics regardless of party affiliation, but most scholars of democracy agree that democracy works best when its citizens use reason and judgment to form their decisions.

None of that is exceptionally insightful, but it's a set of points that deserve to be framed and highlighted

The ADHD "Natural Fix"

NYT:

Normally, when someone is unfocused and at rest, there is synchrony of activity in brain regions known as the default mode network, which is typically more active during rest than during performance of a task. (In contrast, these brain regions in people with A.D.H.D. appear functionally disconnected from each other.) Dr. Mattfeld found that adults who had had A.D.H.D as children but no longer had it as adults had a restoration of the normal synchrony pattern, so their brains looked just like those of people who had never had it.

WE don’t yet know whether these brain changes preceded or followed the behavioral improvement, so the exact mechanism of adult recovery is unclear.

But in another measure of brain synchrony, the adults who had recovered looked more like adults with A.D.H.D.

In people without it, when the default mode network is active, another network, called the task-positive network, is inhibited. When the brain is focusing, the task-positive network takes over and quiets the default mode network. This reciprocal relationship is necessary in order to focus.

Both groups of adult A.D.H.D. patients, including those who had recovered, displayed simultaneous activation of both networks, as if the two regions were out of step, working at cross-purposes. Thus, adults who lost most of their symptoms did not have entirely normal brain activity.

Mystical Magical Musings

Is there an overall direction to humanity's evolution? Are we getting smarter? Kinder? Better able to appreciate reality, supplied by rationalism, and less afraid of the monster hiding under the bed? Not really.

Scholars sometimes talk about this supernaturalization as a kind of “re-enchantment” of the world — as a growing awareness that the modern world is not stripped of the magical, as the German sociologist Max Weber and so many others once thought, but is in some ways more fascinated than ever with the idea that there is more than material reality around us. In part, I think, this is because skepticism has made the supernatural safe, even fun. It turns out that while many Americans may think that there are ghosts, they often don’t believe that ghosts can harm them.

There is, however, a deeper reason. Just as spiritualism became a means to hold on to the supernatural claims of religion in the face of science in the 19th century, the supernaturalism of our own time may enable something similar. The God that has emerged in the post-1960s “renewalist” Christianity practiced by nearly a quarter of all Americans is vividly supernatural — a Jesus who walks by your side just as Jesus walked with his disciples. This assertion that the supernatural is natural helps to make the case for God in a secular age, because it promises people that they will know by experience that God is real.

Perhaps technology plays a role as well. Our world is animated in ways that can seem almost uncanny — lights that snap on as you approach, cars that fire into life without keys, websites that know what you like to read and suggest more books like those. The Internet is not material in the ordinary way. It feels somehow different. Maybe this, too, stokes our imagination.

This suggests there may be even more supernaturalism in years to come.

Jeez isn't that encouraging...

I think it all goes back to our biological nature.

The Wake of Destruction Caused by Fundamentalist Capitalism

Monbiot summarizes the effects of our religiously-flavored free-market devotion:

By the mid-1990s, the doctrine of market fundamentalism – also known as neoliberalism – had almost all governments by the throat. Any politicians who tried to protect the weak from the powerful or the natural world from industrial destruction were punished by the corporate media or the markets. This extreme political doctrine – that governments must cease to govern – has made direct, uncomplicated action almost unthinkable. Just as the extent of humankind’s greatest crisis – climate breakdown – became clear, governments willing to address it were everywhere being disciplined or purged. Since then, this doctrine has caused financial crises and economic collapse, the destruction of livelihoods, mountainous debt, insecurity and the devastation of the living planet. It has, as Thomas Piketty demonstrates, replaced enterprise with patrimonial capitalism: neoliberal economies rapidly become dominated by rent and inherited wealth, in which social mobility stalls. But despite these evident failures, despite the fact that the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.

And the problems are going to get worse. When corporations and the rich control so much of our government, the problems affecting the majority of us are ignored for the problems that directly affect the rich and powerful. As more and more cash flows directly from the wealthy to the government, and Republicans work harder to pry open those floodgates a little more each day, it will accelerate the decay.

Dismal Disconnect

I read the other day that 80-some percent of college graduates do not have a job lined up after May. This is not surprising. Today I was reading that solutions to this problem look far and away, since colleges, students, and employers do not share the same perspectives:

"Busteed said that 96 percent of the college provosts Gallup surveyed believed their schools were successfully preparing young people for the workplace. “When you ask recent college grads in the work force whether they felt prepared, only 14 percent say ‘yes,’ ” he added. And then when you ask business leaders whether they’re getting enough college grads with the skills they need, “only 11 percent strongly agree.” Concluded Busteed: “This is not just a skills gap. It is an understanding gap.” ...the success stories shared a lot of the same attributes that Gallup found to be differentiating. In successful programs, said Auguste, “students got as much applied, hands-on experience as possible, whether in a classroom or on a job site. Schools, colleges and training centers had close partnerships with regional employers, industry groups and skilled trade unions to stay up to date on job-relevant skills. And students or working learners got a lot of coaching and guidance to understand how to trace a direct path between their training today and careers tomorrow.”

Pretty discouraging...

Florida Physicians' Freedom to Practice Limited

It's amazing to me how selective conservatives are with "regulations" and "state interference"...besides the obvious issues of gay marriage and abortion, the issue of guns makes conservatives, well, confused about how involved government should be in restricting peoples' rights.

On the one hand, they'll complain that government should "stay out of" health care entirely. On the other hand, they'll ask the government to impose restrictions on physicians. Keep in mind that most of Florida (northern, western panhandle, central) is "lower Georgia" with all the attendant Southern GOP mentality.

Follow the money

It's still amazing that people want to use the "they both do it" excuse to blame politicians of both parties for being in the pocket of big-monied interests. The disparity between the parties is amazing, and the fact that the GOP has pushed hard for unlimited, anonymous campaign donations, while Democrats have pushed back with campaign finance reform laws, tells the whole story.

Follow the money, and you'll find the truth.

In financial terms, the Republican Party and its candidates are now more in line with their ties to corporate America and the rich. They have turned increasingly to large contributors — donors who make gigantic donations to “super PACs” and “social welfare” organizations that claim tax exempt status under the 501(c)4 provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. So far, 501(c)4 committees have successfully avoided publicly identifying their donors. No matter how used to all this we’ve all become, the numbers are striking. The amount of money flowing into federal campaigns — for Congress and the presidency — has been growing rapidly, doubling from $3.1 billion in 2000 to $6.3 billion in 2012. While overall spending increased by more than 100 percent from 2000 to 2012, spending by secretive political nonprofits, which do not disclose donors, has exploded 13-fold, from $24.9 million in 2000 to $335.7 million in 2012. Four out of every five dollars, or $269.5 million, raised by tax-exempt groups, most of which claim to be “social welfare organizations,” go to pro-Republican and conservative groups. These political nonprofits have become a key source of indirect support for Republican candidates. As Figure 2 shows, spending by conservative nonprofits has grown from $2.5 million in 2000 to $269.5 million in 2012. Liberal nonprofit spending has gone from $21.9 million in 2000 to $58.5 million in 2012.

Some disturbing trends are already emerging about the inability to regulate coordination between lobbyists, ultra-wealthy donors and campaigns. The influence of this money is more worrisome by the fact that the FEC can't seem to keep up with campaign finance disclosures anymore. A lot of this stuff comes down to common sense. If you vote for the party who is now helping billionaires to buy elections, you're contributing to the problem. Why is there even a "debate" on whether or not the Koch's SuperPAC is corrosive to our democracy?

Intelligence & Genius, cont'd

Nancy Andreasen has a great piece in The Atlantic from a few weeks back, outlining her case that mental illness and creativity are correlated. On the other hand, she establishes that IQ and creativity are not correlated beyond ~120, and using "Terman's termites" and some other studies to support it. This isn't the first time I've pondered the link between genius and depression, and I've been thinking a lot about intelligence, neuroscience and creativity lately. Although gifted is far more PC, I love the word genius, which is apparently akin to the idea of a mental muse.

In that sense, then, you can't be a genius so much as you can have a genius. And having genius, like having depression, must be related to brain function overall. There is some evidence that the right side of the brain is more involved in feelings of unhappiness, while the left side is more involved in feelings of happiness. This comports with the idea that left-handers are overrepresented in creative fields of the arts and music, and some people make the case that left-handedness often associates with intelligence generally.

If you aren't lucky enough to be born left-handed, you could always meet (and marry) the right partner, as the case is often made that creatives require dialectic co-opetition. If you are as lucky as Lolita's author, you can join many creatives in marrying an inspiring partner, like Vera Nabokov. Genius authors like Nabokov generally have to be able to see, to perceive, and to relate that vision through fluent prose and dialog.

I don't know what I aspire to, but I know I have a partner with whom I share the yin-yang sympatico, and she definitely makes me a happier, better person, whose chances at creative output are far, far higher than if I was without her.

Brain Science Stuff

In the NYT's The Trouble with Brain Science, the author repeats some points on complexity that I made in April 2013. For example, the author laments that biology cannot hope for a Grand Unified Theory of neuroscience in the same way that physics can for particles. In going on, the article states:

The appearance of genius

Brooks writes today:

First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment, feeling where the flow of events is going. Genius is in practice perceiving more than the conscious reasoning. 

There may be no universally-conceded definition of genius, nor gifted, nor even intelligence. This take on it has a strong ring of truth. Genius is seeing more than knowing.

Brooks has been on a deep kick lately. Trying to reach for a Pulitzer or something?

Creative combinations: Lennon and McCarthy

Brooks thinks that Lennon's chaos and depression needed McCarthy's meticulous pop to make a final product. And he thinks all creativity relies upon the dialectic:

But sometimes it happens in one person, in someone who contains contradictions and who works furiously to resolve the tensions within. When you see creative people like that, you see that they don’t flee from the contradictions; they embrace dialectics and dualism. They cultivate what Roger Martin called the opposable mind — the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time. If they are religious, they seek to live among the secular. If they are intellectual, they go off into the hurly-burly of business and politics. Creative people often want to be strangers in a strange land. They want to live in dissimilar environments to maximize the creative tensions between different parts of themselves.

Another interesting note is that ADHD and giftedness are hard to distinguish, thought to be parallel, and may be in "co-petetion" [sic] with one another. The ADHD helps generate constant novelty, while the giftedness acts as a filter, recognizing good ideas from bad. Although tons of people say things about how famous writers, inventors, scientists, etc., were ADHD or 2e, the truth is that you have to have focus and drive to be successful on that level. And drive is not necessarily easy to get or keep.

PS: I'm reading Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land right now.

Commitments

When do beliefs and facts collide?

When you decide at the outset that something is true, your commitment may blind you to contrary evidence and rational expectations. Let's compare the intellectual commitments of science versus, say, politics or religion: In science, we presume the uniformity of nature. This means we assume that the laws of gravity, electromagnetism, etc., are fundamental properties of the universe, rather than contingent features that are subject to change. This presumption is useful because it allows us to interpolate and extrapolate data. A simple example would be inferring the age of the earth from geological processes, or isotope decay, or measuring the distance to stars. This premise is very, very difficult to falsify.

And that's the beauty of skepticism: start with very basic assumptions, and continue to question them as new evidence and information arises. Religious belief is quite different for two main reasons: 1) some religions require obedience and faith that is defined as without evidence, and 2) the commitments of religious people are sometimes so complex that they don't even realize how difficult their position is to defend. The first reason is rather clear and doesn't need much elaboration, in the sense that belief in a Garden of Eden or Resurrection or whatever clearly defies common sense and every scientific principle known to man.

Tell me what you think about your motivation

The secret of effective motivation? Steer away from instrumental (external) consequences and incentives. Focus on cultivating the internal drive. Sounds good and all...but how easy / practical is that?

Fear the robots

Will automation accelerate the concentration of capital, skewing inequality further and destablizing democracy? Probably.

Krugman also thinks so. (also: here, here, here, here, here, here)

An aside: When the best conservative minds at Forbes decry this assessment by pleading,

"If we’ve pretty much abolished material scarcity then of course real wages have just soared. Real wages being, really, a measure of how much consumption is possible rather than the nominal value of earnings. If you are of a Marxist persuasion you might think that all of the money from those androids will just go to capital, leaving the workers starving and destitute without any jobs and thus not earning at all. But to do that you would have to believe in Monopoly Capitalism, this idea that the capitalists as a class will gang up on everyone else and keep all the good stuff for themselves. But note that this does depend upon that monopoly."

... then you should worry. Or should we not fear the robots? Steven Rattner says so.

Fear of change, especially technologically-driven change, conjures images of the Luddites and Amish. It goes back. Life Magazine from July 19, 1963: article by Keith Wheeler on automation screams, "Impact of Automation: Its Accelerating Effects have Pushed Our Society to the Point of No Return"

I lean towards Krugman and Life, although I am hopeful that humanity will surprise me.

Writing resources

This post exists mostly as a resource for me later on.

Comment from Amazon reviewer concerning On Writing Well:

1) The things that come to the writer easiest -- cliché, excessive detail, syrupy and vague language -- are the things that keep the reader bored/detached/passive.
2) Your main task as a writer is to distill the essence of whatever you're writing about--to find its central idea, to describe its distinctive qualities using precise images. In other words, your main task is to work excruciatingly hard.

Atlantic article distinguishing two approaches to the craft of writing: pre-determination of a novel versus letting "a character show the way" through the story.

New Yorker article describing the structure of writing:

The approach to structure in factual writing is like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with. If something is red and globular, you don’t call it a tomato if it’s a bell pepper. To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not. Where you have a free hand, you can make interesting choices.

And the nature of those choices determines your quality and style.

Toe the party line, or else!

So Dick Metcalf, a dude who makes his living reviewing firearms and writing pieces for gun magazines has suddenly become anathema to gun nuts everywhere. How? He dared to use the word "regulation" in a way that wasn't an accusation. He points out the obvious: that the 2nd Amendment itself says, "A well regulated militia..." He points out more obvious (something I literally learned and understood in middle school civics): that all of our rights are regulated by some extent -- that individual liberty ends when public safety / welfare begins to conflict with it.

And so those of us who have always understood that gun rights can and must be regulated, and that the argument is about specifics, not if...well, we belong in what's called "the reality-based community," while people who literally are single-issue gun rights voters (i.e., nutbags) are not.

The Angel of Death

...has a face that looks a lot more like a malignant neoplasm than a heart attack.

That's the bottom line from this article at the NYT. The top causes of death are rapidly changing even as we lower the overall mortality rate. Cancer is on the verge of overtaking heart disease. Of course each country and culture will have slightly varying percentages.

As the author astutely points out, cancer is much more complex to "cure" than many other death risk factors. Our cellular machinery has an inbuilt capacity to regenerate tissue and that will always leave the door open for malfunction.