Intelligence, Environments, Evolution, Change, and Choice

Many mornings after I get back from the gym I sip on a "mocha" (french press coffee instead of espresso), read my email, google news, social media, and watch random YouTube videos for a few minutes. YouTube gives me a selection of videos based on what it perceives as my interests. Sometimes it is correct, sometimes it isn't. Through an obscure chain I have been getting Jordan Peterson videos (I don't recommend). Mostly I ignore these, but I did watch one the other day where he was talking about intelligence. Peterson seemed to think the notion of intelligence was well understood and could be measured with IQ tests. I had a professor who, when asked what an IQ score meant, said that an IQ score measured what you scored on an IQ test.

Jordan equated intelligence with what IQ tests measure. But there are other definitions. In popular culture we have "book smart" and "street smart"".  Most odd to me  is Donald Trump's apparent definition. He summarized it speaking about Xi Jinping, China's current dictator. “He runs 1.5 billion people with an iron fist. Yeah, I think he’s pretty smart. And they have a chain over there. If you’re a dummy, you get left here,” he said, gesturing low. “It’s like a pyramid. The smartest one gets to the top. That didn’t work so well recently in our country.” Both Peterson and Trump think they know what intelligence is and they know who has it. Of course that divides the world into two camps, smart people and not smart people. That, in turn, allows all the cruelty we inflict on the "others".

In a way, Peterson and Trump agree. They each take as markers of intelligence a measure that applies within their cultural environment. IQ tests have been criticized for being strongly associated with a particular culture. This disadvantages those outside that culture. The first IQ tests were developed to predict how successful a child will be in school. In a school system developed within and for a culture, those who are part of the culture will have an advantage. Using an "IQ" test designed in a different culture/environment, each child's score would be different. In a hunter gatherer culture what would an IQ test look like? Plant identification? Tracking? Endurance? Trump's measure of intelligence is power and money (the two are fungible). Money truly is a marker of fitness within a commercial society. Both Trump and Jordan seem to be so embedded in their own particular environments that they cannot envision different ones requiring different skills.

Book smart indicates scholarly success. Street smart indicates the ability to thrive in urban environments. In creative environments, "talent" is an analogous notion. In high school I had a friend who was brilliant at making things. He had an engineers notion of intelligence. Once he told me, while holding a borrowed object, that the person who understood the most about how something was made and operated should own it. Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dali Lama, embodies intelligence in a compassionate, more spiritual environment.

Evolutionary biologists are usually pretty careful not to associate evolution with any notion of progress, intent, or direction other than generally increasing complexity. Cyanobacteria have existed on earth for over three billion years. They are responsible for the oxygen rich atmosphere on that makes our life possible. Cyanobacteria live basically everywhere. They are genetically diverse with at least 150 genera and over 2500 described species. Each species survives in its own particular environment. On land they live from Antarctica to hot deserts. In water they are ubiquitous, living in oceans, lakes, and rivers. They live solitary and in colonies. It doesn't make any sense to speak of one bacteria species as better than another, or more advanced. Each is simply, uniquely, and beautifully adapted to its particular environment.

We are a single species and the notion of race is a social construct. Real, strong, and dangerous, but a socially constructed notion. The real differences are more broadly spread. Take a random group of ten people from anywhere, it could be from across the world or at a family reunion. In that group you will find large differences in emotional, physical, and intellectual tendencies. I don't think anyone has an answer to the blend of nature/nurture that causes these differences, but they certainly exist. I suspect this broad range is adaptive. Humans live in social groups. Depending on the surroundings, one set of tendencies maybe better adapted than another and different personalities will end up thriving. In a situation filled with immediate threats, the more adventurous and danger seeking among us will thrive. In a situation of stability and wealth, scholars, artists, and engineers will thrive. In both of these cases, the human race is more likely to survive because of this diversity of tendencies.

We live in our environment, but we also construct it, just as the cyanobacteria constructed our oxygen rich atmosphere. Unlike the bacteria, we can think about the world we want and deliberately move to create it. This is an individual ability, but more importantly it is a collective ability. As social animals we can decide as groups how we want to live and what we want the world to look like. We exhibit personality and thought tendencies, perhaps from birth, but these are just tendencies. Depending on our situation we repress some tendencies and work to enhance others to fit better with our surroundings. The human environment is largely social, our culture. Cultures are an aggregation of individuals complete with agreements both legal and informal. There are rewards for acquiescence and punishments for transgressions. Individual changes affect how others relate to us as an individual. Larger cultural changes require communication and agreement of more people and oftentimes changes to formal consensus such as laws. Culture changes all the time, sometimes accidentally through the zeitgeist, sometimes deliberately through popular movements or propaganda.

If we can deliberately change our social environment, our culture, then we leave the world of evolutionary biology behind and can introduce notions of human progress, human direction. Humans now control the planet and are causing a sixth great extinction of other species. We can continue to act largely through individual greed, ignorance, and accident or we can learn explicit cultural intent. I hope we can do this with a long view of the future to ensure our great, great, great, great grandchildren live fulfilling lives in a world they love.

How should we change our world? Each of us has to decide this for ourself, then try to find and persuade others to think and feel likewise. Not just find others, but a set of others whose span of collective intelligence is large enough to affect almost everyone. Not just find and persuade, but engage in collective action to create change.

Cultural Appropriation and Music

 This post is about cultural appropriation, particularly in regard to music. It will take a while to get there so I ask for your patience.

Music is a human and personal expression. Every single musician has a personal approach to music and every performance is idiosyncratic. Every group of musicians has its own communal personality based on the skill, backgrounds, interactions and the style of the music. We know from from found flutes that music is at least 35,000 years old, but I suspect it is as old as the species. Just as there are no "primitive" languages, there are no "primitive" musical styles. 

Music changes over time. Knowledge passes from musician to musician through collaboration and explicit teaching. I was trained to play the flute in the classical tradition. I was a student of Frank Bowen, who was a student of Marcel Moyse, who was a student of Phillip Gaubert, who was a student of Paul Taffanel who studied under Vincent Dorus who studied under Joseph Guillou who studied with François Devienne. That partial chain goes back over 250 years. It is part of a tradition of western music that is as old as western culture. Western classical music has gone through various stylistic changes, but the chain is unbroken. In India, the tradition of raga has an even more consistent thematic history that goes back over a millennium. I am sure the same unbroken chains of musical tradition exist in almost every culture throughout the world.

Music is passed on by ear, personal instruction, and practice. In different times and places people have created notational systems for music. As with all notational systems, including written language, the notation is incomplete. Think about a play, say Shakespeare's Hamlet. The written play is fixed. There are occasional directions in the text "Enter LAERTES and OPHELIA".  In addition to the written play there is an unbroken chain of performance tradition passed from actor to actor and director to director. Despite this continuity, every performance of the play is different, often dramatically (pun intended). Every spoken word is interpreted by an actor who decides pace, emphasis, tone... Think how many ways there are to say "To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;". Within each tradition every generation, in fact every person, reinvents the tradition as part and parcel of performance and education.

Every work of performance art has an initial creator. Wanting credit for work and wanting to benefit from the fruit of our labor is an important human trait. Over time, virtually all performed art changes. This is true even when the only one who performs it is the creator. Over time phrases are polished, awkward parts added or changed, harmonies enriched... In folk music the  original creator is often unknown. Sometimes the author is unknown because the work is very old but I suspect the folk tradition also puts less emphasis on preserving the source.

In music, it is common that the original composition is only a structure. The composer intends for the performers to provide a complete piece on the basis of the structure. This is often visible in the music notation. In jazz, pieces are written as a melody with an associated set of chords (the changes). In performance this provides the basis for a set of variations. In Classical Baroque music, a piece may be given as a melody line and a figured bass, which is a bass line plus a set of chord symbols, much the same as jazz. In both Jazz and Baroque music the performers are expected to flesh out this skeleton and each of the players uses the written chords and melodies as a hints to guide their improvisation.

Because we are human, even brand new inventions are almost always based on existing objects and techniques. Jazz is only a hundred or so years old. It has grown and changed and now has multiple styles (New Orleans, BeBop, cool, fusion, free...). It originated from a number of traditions, most African based, including the blues. The Wikipedia list of  jazz contrafacts has over 50 separate jazz tunes based on George Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm". Wikipedia also has a partial list of uses of the Gregorian Chant "Deus Irae". There are over 40 citations including Haydn, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, George Crumb, John Williams and Jethro Tull. In current pop music, songs are often electronically constructed from individual sounds and phrases; "samples" taken directly from perviously recorded songs.

So... in music there are multiple traditions around the globe. Each tradition is constantly changing and each "piece" is subject to interpretation. Moreover, musical appropriation is rampant.

With the advent of radios, automobiles, and recorded music it became much easier to hear performances by people who live far away and have other musical traditions. When musicians hear new music, they imitate what they like and incorporate it into their own playing. This is how the largely African American traditions of blues, jazz, R&B... entered vernacular of white musicians and the commercial world of largely white owned corporations. 

The blues musician Robert Johnson has a known output of 29 songs. Eric Clapton has recorded at least 24 of them, including a tribute album. He has been respectful of the music and has given Robert Johnson credit. In fact Robert Johnson's fame has multiplied partly because of Clapton's work. That said, Clapton was a young white kid who heard, was affected by, copied, and helped commercialize the style.

In the U.S. there is a tradition of oppression and exploitation of black musicians. In general black musicians have been the inventors of styles and white musicians imitated. Note I say "in general". No one can deny the ingenuity and genius of, say Bill Evans, but the trend holds. A few years ago the New York Times published a photo with the headline "Is This the Greatest Photo in Jazz History?" The photo shows four musicians playing:  Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, and Charlie Parker. These are four of the greatest jazz musicians who ever lived. The photo was taken on a Sunday night in a half filled dive. Neither Monk nor Parker had their cabaret licenses, which meant they were playing illegally. Cabaret licenses in New York were a means for the police to oppress musicians. Billie Holiday was hounded to death by government authorities, largely to suppress the song "Strange Fruit". Part of that hounding was taking away her cabaret license to reduce her ability to make a living.

The term "cultural appropriation" was coined in the 1970s. The Oxford language definition is "the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society."  As an old white man, I can be viewed as a member of a culture that is most likely to oppress and appropriate. As a human being and a musician, I can be knowledgable and sensitive to cultural appropriation, but I cannot avoid taking from other cultures. 

In 1901 a Japanese composer, Rentarō Taki, wrote a tune he called "Kōjō no Tsuki" as a music lesson. The song was popularized by a Japanese singer, Yoshie Fujiwara, in the 1920s. I have it in a book of flute tone exercises assembled by Marcel Moyse. That is part of how the tune become incorporated into the western classical tradition. In 1967 Thelonious Monk recorded a jazz tune "Japanese Folk Song" based on the melody. Monk's version is pure jazz with precious little Japanese influence other than the melody itself. The classical version collected by Moyse is simply the melody. In Japan there is a flute called the shakuhachi with a long and distinguished tradition as rich and complex as any other musical tradition (KODEN SUGOMORI (TSURU NO SUGOMORI): Mamino Yorita, shakuhachi player). I love listening to shakuhachi music, but I have never studied it. When I perform Kōjō no Tsuki" I play it as a theme with improvised variations. I will typically have variations that apply some of the gestures found in shakuhachi playing (pitch bends, short grace notes...) to the melody. Many other traditions including Irish penny whistle and blues guitar have "similar" gestures. Because I am not part of the shakuhachi tradition, it is unlikely that I perform these gestures in the same way that a shakuhachi player would. But I am me and I am playing my music the way I play it. I have stolen the melody just as Monk and Moyse did. I have stolen some gestures from the Japanese and,in other variations,  jazz traditions. My use of jazz gestures is probably equally inauthentic. I acknowledge the sources. If there were any money involved (there isn't) I would feel guilty that some of it did not trickle back to those who created the traditions.

Every single person speaks a unique language. Each person uses particular words and phrases. Each person has a particular way of telling stories. The way themes are introduced, the directness or indirectness of getting to the point, the arrangement of sentences; these are all particular and unique to each person. It is their idiolect. We understand each other because the overarching language allows these variations. We also criticize each other for not following our particular language norms (tenses, number agreement, we vs us, split infinitives ...).

It is the same with culture. Each of us is unique and particular. Because we live in social groups, we experience many of the same things as our neighbors and tend to conform to their patterns of behaviour. We also criticize others for violating norms.

People who study cultural appropriation say a line is crossed when members of the culture from which you have taken material find your use dishonorable. But culture is not monolithic. It is an aggregation of particular and idiosyncratic individuals. Who judges? Is it the most sensitive member of a group? Is it when a critical mass of people agree? When there is a critical mass, we can definitely agree on offense and appropriation. The "n word" and blackface are examples. I can definitely say that any white person who uses the n word or blackface is abusing culture in an offensive way and should be called on it. For general politeness, it is good to avoid offending even a single individual. My experience is that the most sensitive among us find a great deal objectionable. To submit to the most sensitive on every topic would be to freeze action. There are people who become incensed and offended when a stick of butter is sliced in an irregular fashion. When such a person is present, I curb my butter cutting. When they are not around, screw them. It's my butter and I'll slice it how I like.

Each of us takes elements from our complete surroundings. What we see and hear affects what we say and do. Each of us will sometimes offend others. Each of us will sometimes do things that violate even our own notions of what we "should" do. I try to be sensitive to others but, being a generally oblivious person, I probably fail often. I hope and expect that others will call me out when my behaviour is bad. I also reserve the right to disagree.

In my music I am going to continue to borrow what I find useful for what I am trying to express. I will try to be aware and sensitive to cultural background, but I cannot spend years studying each tradition I borrow from as I use it in my individual expression. From the background of other cultures I will undoubtedly misuse elements I have borrowed. I hope people point this out so I can learn and perhaps change what I do. In the end though, I am me. I will do what I do, and take my lumps when I offend others and they call me on it.

Vaccines and Nazis

 In the wake of a Tennessee school board banning the graphic novel "Maus" a friend posted a meme 

"FUN FACT: Kids who read Maus don't grow into adults who constantly compare minor inconveniences to the Holocaust". 

One of their friends responded with:

"Those who have read Maus I & Maus II realize the steps to genocide and become aware much earlier than those who haven’t, that what appears to be minor inconveniences to someone who they are manipulated into “othering” is much more significant than that and is one of the first steps to much worse. I TA’d a class on the Shoah/Holocaust at UCLA in which we carefully analyzed the beginnings of the Holocaust, which most did not recognize. They looked at propaganda about Jewish people, political dissidents, gypsies and LGBTQ people as a minor inconvenience. They saw it, as is happening to some disabled and religious minorities today with the current drug mandates, to be a minor inconvenience that they couldn’t go to the movie theater or a play or dtudy or work anymore. They saw it as a minor inconvenience that they were forced to publically identify themselves as other. Often it was mistakenly justified as they can choose-a different political

ideology, sexual orientation, religion- and nowadays to take the offered drugs. It requires empathy to step into another’s shoes and realize that not being able to work, travel, or study is not a minor inconvenience. Not being able to go to cultural events, museums, the theater, restaurants or other public places like trains is not a minor inconvenience. At least not for those being othered. Did the author of this meme really study the Holocaust, including the couple of years before the camps? Did they sit and watch the propaganda videos and read Wiesel and Primo Levi? The Nazi propaganda is eerily similar to much of the big pharma propaganda played on corporate news nowadays. Very little facts, much obsession with a monolithic view of what science and facts are, which does not allow for critical thought or inquiry. Intensive censorship."

There is a lot to unpack here. Before I start, so it doesn't get lost in the rest of this little essay, I want to be clear. I view the facebook response to be a clear instance of "comparing minor inconveniences to the holocaust". But... the response is complex and makes some interesting points, so I think it's worth a discussion. References to support my statements are available upon request.

This as a slippery slope argument. I think the basic point that moving into the Holocaust was a step by step process of dehumanization is true and valid. It is also true that part of the process is a gradual separation of us and them, with "them" being restricted in activities. At first the restrictions seemed relatively innocuous, like explicit identification, but then moved rapidly to eliminating necessities like education, work, and property.

It is also true that these tactics are not novel and this can happen in any society, including our own. The target can be foreigners; look at the English treatment of the Irish before, during, and after the great famine. Sometimes they are used to oppress subcultures like the  Uyghurs in China. Sometimes it is appearance, like black people in the United States. As with the Nazis the playbook is often used in conjunction with other techniques to establish an oppressive dictatorship. Dictatorships are usually created with the support of a substantial portion of the population. Garnering support is easier in the face of an identified threat from within: communists, Jews, homosexuals, elitists... 

We know from past experience that there is a slippery slope. But not every government action that separates "us" from "them" leads down that slope. A counter example is the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA. It identifies a class, disabled people, that has historically been a group that is shunned and discriminated against. The ADA does exactly the opposite. It forces the rest of us, under force of law, to make accommodations for the disabled. Each of us must park farther from the door of the store, must make curb cuts when we put in sidewalks. When I built my coffee shop I had to install a section of counter that was low enough so that a person in a wheelchair could easily sign a credit card slip. In other words, for the protection of a particular class of people, my freedoms are restricted and I am forced to act in ways that are sometimes expensive and inconvenient. 

In fact, a defining characteristic of humans is our ability to band together and subsume our personal interests to the groups to which we belong. This is one of the characteristics that makes our species so powerful. It is also the double edged sword I have described. On the one hand it allows us to create cruel and dictatorial societies. On the other hand it allows us to band together and make the lives of everyone better.

We band together with different groups of different sizes. The most universal is the family, but we also create a societies with friends, work groups, and legal entities (city, county, state, nation...).

Because the subject of the facebook response is really the societal attempt to get everyone vaccinated for Covid, it is worth looking at vaccination in general. I think the most popular vaccination in the U.S. was for polio. Smallpox vaccination had shown people that vaccinations could be safe and effective. Polio was severe and widespread. Even today, there are people who do not have full use of their limbs because of polio. The polio vaccine was partially funded by voluntary public contributions. When the vaccine became available it was eagerly accepted and there was little protest.

When the Europeans came to the "new world" they brought disease, most notably smallpox, with them. Within a generation or two as much as 90% of the native population was dead from disease. This makes the Black Death in Europe look like a Sunday picnic.

Benjamin Franklin wrote: “In 1736, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if the child died under it: my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”

Franklin's son died in 1736, but he had been a supporter of smallpox vaccination since at least 1721. Why wasn't his son vaccinated? Franklin blamed himself, but there is a school of thought that it was his wife Deborah who resisted and Franklin resented her for it. It is known that he found excuses to be away from his wife for years at a time. If the speculation is true, it is a case where Franklin sacrificed his own desire to vaccinate to that of his family group (his wife), and it cost him his son.

There are groups that should generally be ignored regardless of their sincerity, their arguments, or the depths of their belief. An example is the "flat earthers". People who believe that the earth is flat. They are interesting psychologically and sociologically, but their beliefs are simply wrong. The current scientific theories of gravity are some of the best tested theories in existence. Over all space and time scales the theories have been confirmed. The structure of the earth and the solar system are well known and described. Our models are predictive and confirmed by those predictions. We can, for example, predict eclipses, the length of the days, the precession of the North Pole, the tides caused by the moon... In contrast, the flat earth theories are a mess. They don't explain much of anything and can be disproven by anyone who has a simple knowledge of geometry. Despite this, the beliefs are remarkably resistant to change. All objections are met with an answer, incorrect, but usually in a form that has a surface coherence, and apparently raise more doubts about the scientific explanation.

The flat earthers are a case where we (individuals, educational systems, the media, government...) do not have to discuss "both sides". There are not two sides. We have well established information and we have a few people spouting nonsense.

Gravity is relatively (pun intended) simple. Many of the things in our lives are much more complicated. We have created large systems to measure, analyze, theorize... In science the system includes peer review of results to enforce honesty and reduce sloppiness. It is not perfect but, on the whole, the system works and knowledge increases. 

In economics we require large scale data collection to feed our analysis and understanding. Over the past century the government has refined the collection of economic and demographic data and put firewalls in place to reduce political manipulation of the data and its analysis. Again, it doesn't always work, but in general the data we have is roughly correct.

Medicine is another case where large scale data is needed. Data collection is difficult, but we have made progress. The insurance system requires standard diagnosis and treatment codes. All deaths are classified, which is why we know how many people died from being tangled in bed sheets. Of course no one knows that you had a cold three years ago because you did the sensible thing and waited for it to go away without seeing a doctor.

In the case of vaccines, we keep records. Each suspected side effect is tracked. This includes reports from physicians and large scale studies of correlations between vaccine recipients and reported illness. The data are not perfect, but they are not bad. For Covid, hundreds of millions of doses have been administered. There is simply no doubt that the Covid vaccines are safe and side effects are incredibly rare.

For Covid as a medical condition, we have done a terrible job of keeping track. The best data we have are for hospitalizations and death. We also have the results from PCR tests. These come from a self selected sample, but act as a reasonable indicator of prevalence. 

Two things we know about Covid pretty certainly. First, in many people the disease is severe. Second, the vaccines used in the U.S. are safe and effective. The vaccines dramatically reduce the chance of severe illness and the rate of transmission. To dispute the severity of the illness or the effectiveness of the vaccines, you have to ignore the ICU at your local hospital and the testimony of the doctors and nurses who work there. This information is easy to get and widely disseminated. To deny it is ignorance at the level of the flat earthers. 

Smallpox and polio are diseases of humans, they have no animal reservoirs. That means if we eradicate the disease in humans, it goes extinct. Through world wide societal action, we have eradicated smallpox. It is simply gone. Some of this action was governmental and coercive. Children were not allowed in school unless they were vaccinated. Another way to say that is that unvaccinated children were identified as a group, singled out for special treatment, and refused access to education. This did not create a slippery slope leading to a dictatorship in the United States or anywhere else. In my view, it was a correct societal action that allowed a scourge of mankind to be eliminated.

Polio is nearly eradicated. It still exists in pockets around the globe. Those pockets exist because ignorant and militant ideologues in those places prevent vaccination. These repressive elements sometimes assassinate health care workers traveling from village to village trying to save children by vaccinating them.

An old saying is: Your right to extend your fist ends at my nose. In the case of disease it is sometimes hard to tell what your fist is and where my nose is. In 1907 a paper was published that traced a set of typhoid fever outbreaks occurring between 1900 and 1907 to a single person, later nicknamed Typhoid Mary. Mary was asymptomatic and never accepted that she was transmitting the illness. She was forcibly quarantined and her treatment by the state was appalling. Eventually she was released on condition that she take precautions to prevent spreading the disease and not work as a cook. She tried being a lower paid laundress but eventually returned to cooking. She again transmitted the disease and again was forcibly put into quarantine where she remained for over twenty years until her death. Conservatively, at least fifty three people were infected and at least three died because of Mary. There have been other asymptomatic carriers of typhoid fever, but none so famous or as appallingly treated as "Typhoid Mary". What should be done with someone who injures those around them and refuses to stop?

I have a grandson who is medically compromised. That is, he is more likely to get disease and, if he gets sick, is more likely to have severe symptoms. His life is easily put in danger. Because of Covid, this child has spent a third of his life basically confined to his home. His parents movements and actions are constrained because they do not wish to unwittingly infect him. Visitors to the home have to quarantine for a period of time and have a negative test before being allowed in. One of the reasons this has dragged on for so long is because there are a large number of people who have dug in their heels and refused vaccination. 

I am angry about this. I believe I am justified. Do I support restrictions on people who have not been vaccinated so the damage they inflict can be limited? You bet I do. If you want to go to a public place where you can infect other people, I want some assurance that you are not a danger to those people. Instead of my grandson, I want those who put him in danger to be restricted.

On Being a Parent

 I was asked to write something about parenting. I don't know if I'm qualified, but I do have experience. I first became a parent a month after my twentieth birthday. I am now toward the end of my sixth decade. That means I have been a parent for more than twice as long as I have not been a parent. I have four children and a large number of grandchildren. This note reflects my aspirations. Sometimes I don't succeed.

I was young, but fortunate, as a first time parent. Both Sarah and I are readers. I also have a tendency to question whatever I am told and try to reason from first principles. Sarah had been working in a good day care center for some time and has a natural affinity for young children. So we read about child rearing. Not just current books, but older ones as well. It became apparent that child rearing is as faddish as all other aspects of culture. This was both troubling and freeing. Troubling because, in a deep sense, no one knows what they are doing. Freeing because reasonable human beings keep being reared despite the fashions. As a species we instinctually know what to do as long as we follow our better nature. We want to touch and hold our children. We want to see them laughing and happy. We want them to be strong, independent, and fearless. Most of us understand that if a child is unhappy, there is a reason for it. We may never find a cause, but there is one. That means an unhappy child needs and deserves love, support, and compassion even if their pain is caused by the trivial or even nothing we can discern.

Children grow to be adults, but they are not adults. They are unreasonable bundles of emotions, actions and reactions. They can sometimes be persuaded by argument, but they are not rational. They are exquisitely and effectively responsive to their environment. Children will mold themselves to get what they need from their environment. They also have all the normal human instincts and emotions: Empathy and cruelty, a sense of fairness and unfairness, love and hate, rewards and revenge. It is important to remember that they respond to the actual environment, not the stated environment. Parents may talk about love, fairness, and respect. If they display disappointment, favoritism, and criticism, the children will respond to the actual environment not the stated one.

Come to think of it, adults are much the same. The difference is that we have a greater mental capacity to examine the world and form rational plans. We also have a more developed capacity to act in accordance with what we think rather than what we feel. As an adult I may feel rage, but if that will not help the situation I will act calmly and unemotionally to make things better.

One very, very, important difference between adults and children is that children are easily distracted. When distracted, they often forget what happened before. My first child, September, was colicky as an infant. That just means she was fussy and often unhappy. That is when I learned that intense physical actions could erase her emotions. When she was fussy I would sometimes hold her high and let her fall, always in my hands, for a few feet. Her internal reaction was basically "what the hell just happened". Processing the experience often erased her previous unhappiness and she could be re-engaged with something happier. It also started me on a path of raw physicality. By the time she was nine months old I would take her and throw her high in the air and catch her on the way down. We both enjoyed it. On the now outlawed spinners in parks (maybe 15 feet across with metal tubes to hold on to) I would push sets of children just as fast as they could take. You had to watch how tight their grips were and whether anyone was turning green, but it was great fun.

For older children, the same lesson applies. When a child is behaving badly you can lecture them and punish them in various ways. However, they simply lack the mental capacity to reflect and change behaviour. A quick explanation is important so they understand how you view the world, but for most incidents after you have explained you can simply erase the situation. I find humor, games, and even the worst mock magic tricks effective. Recently I took an unhappy child who was effectively being punished for bad behavior with siblings and made things ok again by pretending to take a coin from behind their ear. I can't do such a trick, but I made it so apparent that I was disappointed with my repeated failures that it was funny to them. This erased the distress and they could go back to the family without causing additional trouble. The siblings share a short attention span, so the incident was forgotten and reintegration possible. If the punishment had been likely to be effective, I would have left the kid alone. But self reflection is not a strong point for children and I think a wiser course of action is to make the immediate situation better and get back to normal as quickly as possible. In this case, about two minutes.

Once on a family road trip we ran into a blizzard. This did not please my one year old(?) grandchild in his car seat who wanted us to stop and who wanted to be breast fed. Stopping seemed out of the question if we ever wanted to make it home. I drove for maybe six hours as the toddler screamed continuously. Everyone was as kind and patient as we could be with him. We talked and tried to explain, but he did not stop screaming. This made my driving, in a blizzard, on a highway with spun out cars littering the shoulder, "difficult". I must say though, I was impressed with both his stamina and force of will. For a while afterwords I called him The Dark Lord. He has turned into a fine young adult who has learned to control himself better. But I think he still has that underlying determination and force of will.

In that car, there were three generations of people of mixed ages. I like to believe we all modeled and reinforced important lessons: The focus and self control necessary to accomplish what needed to be done in spite of adversity. The ability to act calmly in an emotionally fraught situation. And most importantly, the compassion needed to deal with a child who was, quite reasonably, completely distraught about their situation.

Stories are important. It is how we, as humans, approach life. We tell ourselves stories of who we are, and who we are not. I tell myself the story that I am an honest, intelligent, capable person. I tell myself this, and believe it, despite the fact that I can recite a litany of my deceits, embarrassingly stupid actions, and incompetence. Having this litany is important in being honest to myself. It does not change my view that, on the whole, I am honest, intelligent, and capable. It is something I aspire to even if I don't always accomplish it.

As a parent we have the opportunity, through our actions, to form the inner story a child tells themselves. If they are constantly accused of deception and bad intent, they will form the inner story that they are deceitful and wicked and will behave accordingly. If they are praised for effort and encouraged in kindness, they will form the inner story that they are hard working and kind.

My father's mother, an irish catholic, raised nine boys. Much of it effectively as a single, poverty stricken, mother because her husband developed parkinson's disease and was totally disabled. She was revered by her children and by many of her peers. She said the way to create honest children was to always believe them, even when lies were apparent. That way they understood that the very air around them was filled with an expectation of honesty. It worked. Her children were sometimes SOBs, but they were almost invariably honest. And, as it turned out, invariably intellectually rigorous. They passed these traits to my generation.

I often say that when a child is just born, they rely on us for everything. By the time they are forty five, we hope they rely on us for almost nothing. The art of parenting is managing the transition between the two stages. One important aspect of the transition is agency. Agency is the notion that you can choose a course of action and see it through. As parents I think we should give every child as much agency as possible while still protecting them from irreparable harm. To show them that even adults were children and did things that were not great, I tell young kids stories about times I did embarrassing things. A favorite seems to be the time, when I was about four, I got up from my nap without my mother knowing and walked to the beach (a few blocks away) NAKED. I was brought home in a police car.

In my mind, the statement that I have four children is not quite accurate. For me, any child in my presence is my child. In the presence of a child, I am not important. The child is the important one and what I am thinking and feeling takes a back seat to what they are thinking and feeling. I think this is reasonable because, given the normal course of events, they will be here after I am dead and gone. They will be able to affect the world long after I cannot, and they are the repository of any small legacy of humanity that I hope to leave behind.

Life is often difficult, unfair, and disappointing for each of us. I firmly believe that if anything is going to allow us to improve our lives, it is compassion. For me, that means putting myself aside and trying to understand others. Once we understand, forgiveness is often possible. This includes compassion for ourselves. That does not mean that we condone actions, just that understanding is necessary for correction, change, and redemption.

Compassion is especially important around children. It not only makes their lives better and happier, it also makes for an emotionally supportive environment. That environment allows them to grow into better people.

My basic advice to other parents is this. Compassion begins with putting aside your needs, your emotions, your desire for a different world. As the Buddhists say, "Comparisons are odious". Look at your current children, your current situation. Understand it, and make it better. Do this with as little regard for yourself as you can manage. You have a lot to juggle and a lot of responsibilities. Sometimes when the toddler is screaming, you just have to tend to business and drive the car. Remember, you are the least important person in the room.

Creating Social Engagement

As the number of mass shootings continues to climb I, like everyone else, will put in my two cents about causes and possible solutions.

I do not believe the problem in the US is one of guns. It is a problem of culture and will not end until the culture changes. Luckily, culture is the sum of what each of us thinks, does, and says. That means we can change it by changing ourselves. This personally daunting task becomes easier as we see our friends and neighbors modeling the behavior. Each of us contains a multitude of selves and we just need to let the best of ourselves come out, repress the worst in ourselves, and reward the better actions of others.

In this post I won't be posting much in the way of references, but I believe that my argument is well supported by the evidence. I am looking at trends, not universals.

First, some words on "safe" and "comfortable". It is ingrained that these words belong together. In a recent survey on traffic in my city people were asked to prioritize the importance of a number of items. One of them was "Streets should be safe and comfortable". In fact, safety and comfort do not go together. If people feel too comfortable driving, they increase their speed which, off the highway, makes the street less safe. In the same way, we often feel most comfortable when we do not engage strangers, but we are social creatures and expanding our social circles makes us better people.

Violence against strangers tends to be perpetrated by people who are socially isolated. Social isolation is defined as a lack of contact with other people and it is deadly in a social animal like humans. The opposite of social isolation is social engagement. Increased social engagement makes us more capable in dealing with people in a variety of situations. It gives us greater control of our environment and makes us more aware of what is going on around us.

Here are some ways we can improve our culture and ourselves. Some are simpler than others. All require some effort, at least at the beginning.

You know that weird person you have noticed? The one that makes you a little uncomfortable? Next time you pass him/her, say hello. You need not converse, just acknowledge their existence as a fellow human being and move along. After a while you might make some small talk or even have a real discussion, but that is not a requirement. It is not likely, but eventually that person could turn into your best friend.

Join or start a group. Almost two hundred years ago Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations." Prove him right. Join a book club, a bowling league, a soccer team, a bicycle club ... It doesn't have to require much time. Book clubs generally meet about once a month and you don't even have to read every book.

When you converse, listen to the other person. In general, allow them to have the last word. Listening does not signify assent. When it comes right down to it, you probably disagree with everyone around you on one topic or another. That doesn't mean you have to shun them. However... if someone's views are truly vile, feel free to call them on it. Tell the racist "I'm sorry, I could not disagree more. I think your beliefs are without support and if you act on them I will work against you." Again, this is hard, but with practice you will get better at it. If someone seems like they might be dangerous, report them.

If someone asks you for help, provide it. There are, of course, requests and circumstances that make this unwise or infeasible, but make "yes" your default answer. You can take this a step further. If someone looks like they need help, offer it. A little harder is a change of attitude. Be more concerned that everyone who needs help gets it and less concerned that someone who is "undeserving" may be abusing the system.

Our built environment is often badly constructed for social interaction. Do not support this. In choosing a home we often look at the inside amenities. This is important, but don't forget the outside. Is there somewhere outside, facing the street, where you and a couple friends can sit down and watch the world go by. If not, is there a way to easily construct a sitting spot? If a home fails this simple test, don't buy or rent it. Inside, is there a room where you are likely to spend time that has windows on the street? If not, you will have no opportunity to get to know the daily life of your street. It is harder to integrate into a neighborhood if you never see your neighbors. On a nice evening, think about walking around the block. As you go around, say hello to folks. Ask them about their day. If you cannot do this comfortably or if no one is ever around to say hello, you have a bad neighborhood. Try to fix it or move.

Vote to make your community better even if it means increased taxes. If there is a ballot measure to build/improve schools, support it. More parks and improved public spaces, support it. Support it especially if it goes to other folks who have less than you. Send your support to the lowest income schools and neighborhoods. Make sure poor kids have good parks and athletic fields. Even better, make sure your community works to integrate people of all incomes and backgrounds into the same neighborhoods. If, as is common, your school board sets the boundaries of schools to keep rich and poor separate, confront the candidates and ask them to change. A unit of neighborhoods is the boundary for the local elementary school. If a school does not have a mix of incomes, bus the rich kids in. Better is to build more lower income housing throughout the town. This seems scary, but all the evidence shows it makes everyone better and safer.

Underlying all of this is an acknowledgement that we are all people. We differ in backgrounds and in how we think society should work. Communication and engagement teaches us about each other, how to get along, and how much we are alike. We exist in a biological ecosystem, but also in a social ecosystem. Make your ecosystems stronger by encouraging diversity and strong connections.

If We Aren't Careful, We May End Up Where We Are Heading.

It is easy to predict man made catastrophes. Sometimes they even happen. Here are some intractable problems/trends that are likely to make the next hundred years "difficult". If we do not find some way, pretty quickly (fifty to one hundred years), to change course I think we could be fairly described as a failed species. That is, things will look much more like "Blade Runner" or "The Mote in God's Eye" than "Ecotopia".
This post assumes an unstated desired future. If your view of a desirable world differs significantly from mine, you may not find any problems here.
The good news is that we can relatively easily make things much much better. The bad news is that, as a species, we seem incapable of making good long term choices. If change occurs it will likely occur on the back of poverty, war, famine, and plague. If change does not occur, we are condemning our descendants to an impoverished, less habitable planet.

Social Trends - Concentration of Wealth

It has always been true in settled societies that wealth is concentrated. As productivity increases in industrialized societies, it takes less and less labor to make the same amount of goods. Either we constantly increase the amount of goods we desire and require (endless growth) or more and more people become "redundant" as they say in England. That is, there is no need for their labor.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was a serious countervailing social movement to redistribute wealth to make societies more equitable. Tides seemed to have turned and, particularly in the United States, the scales have tilted toward unfettered wealth and, along with it, increasing manipulation of both media and elections to serve the plutocracy.
I am not suggesting a trilateral commission type conspiracy. Instead, individuals and groups with plenty of money are doing their best to publicize their point of view and make it the basis of discourse. There has been about a century of systematic work to improve marketing. In the political arena the admonition that government should be more like business has been taken to heart in the propaganda department. Political messages use the tools of marketing (focus groups, test markets ...) to find the most immediately effective messages.
There have been some genuine innovations in the exercise of power though. For example, it is no longer necessary to buy politicians. It is much easier to find someone who already holds your point of view and work for their election. An extreme example is Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co..
Sometimes there are social policies that reinforce the concentration of wealth as an unintended consequence. For example, higher education is increasing in cost and is commonly funded with loans. Forbes reports that two thirds of all students graduating from four year colleges and universities carry loans with an average debt of $23,000. This is a doubling from 1996. Instead of leaving the University with knowledge and a clean slate to start new enterprises, this generation is pretty much forced by debt to become simple employees of existing operations.
We know the end of this story. In the U.S. there is relentless propaganda campaign that insists that we have a pure meritocracy and the wealthy are the ones who feed us all. As the gap between haves and have nots continues to widen and the number of have nots increases, eventually they will simply rebel. If that happens, expect decades of chaos and class warfare with guns.

Social Trends - Fewer, Larger Entities

As technology improves it becomes possible to create larger and larger organizations. Advances in information processing have accelerated this capability.
The current tendency is writ large in the video distribution industry. When VHS tapes became the technology winner, the low entry costs for starting a video store allowed thousands or even tens of thousands of independently owned video stores to blossom. Almost as quickly there was a wave of consolidation as smaller operations were either bought or driven out of business by a regional video chains. These, in turn, were consolidated into a few national chains (Blockbuster, Showtime) which dominated the market. There are still mom and pop video stores, but after the first boom they never had appreciable impact on the market as a whole.
In many industries there are very few real players. This includes media companies where nine companies control virtually all television and Clear Channel controls 1200 radio stations. Four cell phone providers own the lion's share of the mobile phone market (280 million subscribers). There are five major oil companies. Oil companies are among the largest companies that have ever existed. Over half of all farm seed is produced by fewer than ten companies.
As a side effect, increasing institution size also works to further concentrate wealth.
We know from network theory and from study of biological systems that diverse systems which have large numbers of highly interconnected parts are more resilient and less prone to catastrophic failure than systems with fewer nodes and interconnections. When diverse systems of many nodes have some of them fail, the remainder of the system tends to work around the problem. When their are fewer, strongly connected nodes, they tend to drag each other down in the face of disaster. Note how this sounds just like the start of the 2008 financial crisis and the current Greek debt crisis.
In agriculture, the number of farms has decreased, the acreage of each farm has increased, and the vast majority of farms are a monoculture. We have centralized meat and food processing. While the system may be immediately efficient, it is also incredibly fragile and shortsighted. We impoverish the ecosystem, including the soil ecosystem. We also make our food supply dependent on a smaller variety of foods where a single virulent disease can spell disaster. Centralized processing means that millions of people can be infected or poisoned from a single point.
Despite their inherent fragility when faced with the unexpected, in the normal course of events, centralization tends to win. The only way to redress the problems is by creating an environment that rewards smallness or penalizes bigness.

Social Trends - Race to the Bottom

Globalization has allowed the entire world to become a source of labor and products. One side of this is that wealth has flowed to some desperately poor places. The other side is that it has depressed pay in many developed countries and made jobs much less secure. While money does flow toward poor areas of the world, the net effect is to lower labor costs in general. It is interesting to note that globalization involves capital and goods, not people. A factory worker in Sheboygan is competing with workers in Bangalore, but it is unlikely the factory worker can emigrate to Bangalore and take advantage of its lower cost of living.
Globalization allows producers to reduce costs. Labor is part of this, but not the whole picture. It is also possible to reduce costs by operating in locales that allow costs to be ignored or externalized. For example, it will be cheaper to produce in a country that allows wholesale pollution or deforestation because you don't have to install that expensive emission control equipment or worry about forty years down the road when the trees are all gone.
Because every locality wants the jobs, the tendency is to offer the most attractive deal possible to producers who promise jobs. Producers use this to pit localities against each other. Internationally, this rewards countries with the worst labor practices and the most lax regulations. Within the U.S., communities generally bid by offering tax breaks. The hope is that the increased wage base will make up for the breaks, but often the end result is simply to starve local government.
When the cost of production goes down, a number of things can happen. The cost of goods to the end consumer can go down. High tech items show this most clearly but it also shows up in the price of clothes at Old Navy. Second, profits for producers can increase. This has happened as well. In the current "recession" profits for U.S. manufacturers have completely recovered. Finally wages for workers can increase. In the past few decades this has not happened. Wages in the U.S. have been stagnant for almost two generations. When producers (owners) increase profits but workers do not share in the wealth, this increases the concentration of wealth.
Remarkably, public discourse on workers benefits has joined this race to the bottom. Look at the discussion over public pensions. There is a problem with pension funding. Governments have sometimes promised more than was prudent (as did GM and other major corporations). The discussion never seems to be "how can we get private retirement better", it is always "public employees are getting benefits that private employees do not, let's reduce them".

Social Trends - Rise of the Ideologues

Never underestimate the power of a simple idea or worldview even if it is completely wrong or destructive.
People will take a few general principles and assume everything can be explained by them without much regard to complicating factors. If the ideas lead to bad results, it is a failure of application, not the principle.
Among the current Ideologies that are threatening social destruction I would include (non-exhaustive list): radical violent Islam, any religion based on literal inerrancy of the bible, libertarianism, and all forms of racism.

Social Trends - Algorithms and Hubris

There is a notion in computer science called the singularity. This is the creation of smarter than human intelligence. A basic question is, will we notice it?
We already have specialized machines that perform much better than humans. Computers have bested humans in games like chess. Robots create and assemble parts much faster and more accurately than humans. In the computer gaming world, our "enemies" are dumbed down to correspond to our terribly slow human reaction time and limited ability to handle large numbers of inputs. Our planes and cars are already run by computers. Humans enter basic parameters for flight, but the plane itself makes virtually all decisions.
To increase efficiency we constantly streamline and automate business processes. The end result is an expansion in the power of algorithmic systems. In a modern corporation there are fewer and fewer levers pulled by fewer and fewer people. Take shipping as an example. A company like Fed-Ex has completely automated the routing of packages. Once your package information is entered into the system, humans do nothing but follow a machine generated instruction to pick up a box in one place and drop it at another. Airline reservations are another example. Humans do not play any role in the process. The price is determined by complex algorithms that are probably beyond the understanding of any single person. Planes are automatically booked and overbooked. Even upgrades and seat re-assignments are pretty much controlled by the algorithm. The person at the gate has almost no choices and no authority.
The system we have to create these systems is not reassuring. When a business decides to automate a process, a team of people, often outside specialists, is assembled to analyze the problem and implement a solution. When successful, the results are put into production and handed off to a separate team that is in charge of operating, maintaining, and improving the system. In theory this is a repeatable process with each group playing its specialized role. The players usually do not understand each other's roles very well. At the business level, the indicators are productivity (how many flights are booked in how much time and at how much cost) and overall profit and loss. The systems are designed to report some set of indicators so this can be tracked. The people who look at the indicators do not usually understand the underlying algorithms. The people who design and implement the system are specialists in new product creation and generally leave the scene after the process is in place. The people who maintain and improve the system generally have documentation, but they may not be aware of why particular design choices were made and the trade-offs involved.
Another way to state this is that every day we create large algorithmic systems that no single person, or even group of people, understands. As long as he systems work reasonably well or can be discarded, there is no real problem. When the systems fail or are critical but so complex they cannot be discarded, we run into trouble.
On Wall Street, most trading does not involve humans. In 2009 almost three quarters of all stock trades were automated trades based on computer algorithms. Since then this number has almost certainly increased. When you listen to commentators discuss the stock market and why it moves one way or another, it is complete nonsense. It sounds good and it always supports the commentator's overall view of the world, but it is not based in any kind of fact. On May 6, 2010 the stock market briefly crashed. It took five months to issue a report that could attempt to explain what actually happened. The basic answer is that the machines did it.
The hubris part of this trend is that there are people who think we can model and control complex systems. As an example, one of the great failures of modern economics has been the attempt to quantify risk. Do a google search for "quantification of risk economics". You will get pages of google results that are complete nonsense written by people who actually believe they are close to the holy grail of putting a number on risk. Often they create models that work well in certain circumstances - but their predictions ALWAYS fail catastrophically in the long term.
What happens when you put a couple of people with Nobel Prizes in Economics in a room with the Vice Chairman and Head of Bond Trading at Solomon Brothers. You get a well funded scheme to make money based on the finest and most capable economic models of the day. You get "Long Term Capital Management" a firm which made profits until it completely failed in 2000. The failure of a single firm, even a big one, is not particularly important. Unfortunately the firm was so highly leveraged (highly leveraged means "playing with huge sums of other peoples money") it threatened to bring down large portions of the financial system. Fixing the problem required a massive bailout supervised by the Federal Reserve. It failed because of events that they simply could not predict. That is the point. There are always events that we simply cannot predict. We do pretty well with "normal distributions", hence the reliable existence of life insurance. Unfortunately, most real world economics are not "normal".
The run-up to the 2008 collapse was a tribute to the power of simple greed, but all good cons need a convincing story. In this case, investors were reassured that the risk involved in collections of mortgages was known and quantified, and besides, we can hedge (insure) to limit losses. There was outright lying at every level of the financial transactions, but a systemic problem was that the intertwined system intended to reduce risk by spreading it, simply increased risk for everyone. Of course there were some folks who knew about the lying and worked the system to their own advantage (notably, Goldman Sachs).

Social Trends - Missing the Big Picture

Evidence based action is important to understand what works and what doesn't. When we have the evidence it seems silly to ignore it. But, it is also silly to read more into our simple experiments than is actually there.
Experimentation is difficult and expensive. This is especially true with trying to understand humans. Too often we end up understanding and exploiting a tendency. The results may be immediately satisfying but ultimately destructive.
There are many situations where short term investigation gives us a "local optimum" where people are more satisfied at this instant, but the end result is ultimately destructive to our health and well being.
The prime example of this is industrial food production. To build a more popular food product you have to understand what people want so they will buy your product. An industry with a new product must be able to produce it consistently and on a large scale. If you create a focus group or simply ask people on the street to tell you which of several food products they prefer, the winner is likely to be the the cheapest product with the highest sugar/fat/salt. As organisms that evolved in circumstances of want, we crave these things. To produce the product consistently and in large quantities you have to industrialize the production of the raw ingredients. In the case of food this is living organisms. For crops, we standardize the breeds, the methods of production, and we process the results in chemical plants to homogenize, filter, and extract. For animals, we reduce them to eating machines on a cheap controlled diet and we engineer their genetics to change what was an animal into a muscle production machine.
We get consistent products that we biologically crave, we also get obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and an odd form of malnutrition. Don't worry about the malnutrition though, because we have processed supplements to fix that.
Since the introduction of the automobile we have done exactly the same sort of short term fixes. When faced with traffic problems, typically traffic congestion, the answer is always the same. Congestion will be alleviated if we add more lanes and reduce the number of entrances into the main streets (no houses on arterials). It also helps if people stay away from the congested areas. The end result is our typical suburban city form. That is, a built environment that is reasonable if you are a car, but not very suitable for supportive human culture.
On a business level the question is usually "How can we improve our profits this quarter or this year?" It is almost never "How can we stay in this business in a sustainable way?" or "How can we make the world a better place in ten or a hundred years?" If your time horizon for profit is one or even five years and an opportunity arises to make a profit based on destruction that will not become apparent for ten or twenty years, most businesses will take the profit and screw the future, which leads to the next section.

Environmental Trends - Destruction of the Natural World

It is clear that as a species we are quite willing to destroy everything around us for short term survival or short term gain. We are willing to completely destroy the natural environment. Take as examples mountaintop removal for coal, deforestation and overfishing.
On top of this, there are unintended results of our actions. The prime example is global warming. General habitat destruction as we exploit more and more of the world is a severe problem.

Environmental Trends - Unsustainable Human Population

We have already passed a tipping point in human population. We have more people than the planet can sustainably support. Like a profligate child with a large inheritance, we can live for some time by depleting our inheritance, but in the end we will be broke. In this case of humanity, our inheritance is the natural world and all its riches which we are rapidly despoiling.
It is not clear what the carrying capacity of our planet is, particularly since this is partially related to the technology at hand. It is clear that we have exceeded the current capacity. As the human population continues to increase we will see even more rapid environmental degradation as well as more frequent human disasters (crop collapse, famine, social unrest, war for resources...).
In industrial countries population has stabilized or even decreased. This gives some hope that we can control our own numbers. For the world as a whole I think it is likely that we will simply exhaust natural resources. This will cause a very painful decline in human population based on misery.
As a contrast, think what the world would be like with our current technology if we had a third of our current population. We could live in a world of human plenty with a massively improved environment. We have passed the point in human society where increasing human labor is the best way to improve the human condition.

Human Social Groups

Humans are social animals. We band together into family, social, and work groups. Our money societies allow us to see how dependent we are on these social groups. In most societies, roughly half the people earn the money to support everyone. The other half are either engaged in non-money activities, like taking care of children or the infirm, or they are children or infirm. If you are lucky, you will spend roughly a quarter of your life in the care of others. This includes your time as a child and time when age, illness or disability makes it difficult to earn. If you are unlucky, you may spend all of your life dependent on others.

While we have cities containing tens of millions of people, each individual has a much smaller social set. The average person probably has between one and two hundred people with whom they regularly interact. Humans have hierarchies of social identification and protection. Siblings will abuse each other within a family but band together to defend against people outside the family. People complain about intrusions of federal government in local affairs, but join a national army to defend the country. These nested social groups provide us with protection and purpose. We tend to be loyal to those with whom we identify. We will forgive and protect them, even when they do things we would condemn if done by outsiders.

The identification with social groups and antipathy toward outsiders seems to be a base human trait. I know of no social group without some degree of this. The positive part of this tendency is the ability to come together to work toward a common goal. On the negative side, the separation between us and them allows “us” to treat "them" without any consideration other than our own aim.

Separation of "us" from "them" is often justified because “they” are different from “us”. Biologically, this is hogwash. Each of us has parents and there are familial traits. Some of us are blonde and some have black hair. Some groups of people have lived with enough isolation to show adaptation to their surroundings. For example, groups living farther from the equator tend to have lighter skin. These differences are marked enough so that pathologists can identify human groups from these physical traits. That said, humans are also nomadic and relatively recent. This underlies a remarkable degree of genetic homogeneity. I liken the differences between humans to the differences between brown spotted and black spotted Dalmatian dogs. As a species, we have so little genetic diversity that some scientists postulate that the species was reduced to a very small number of individuals in the not so distant past.

Because there are physical differences between human groups, it is interesting to ask if there might be analogs in other areas. For example, some groups of humans might be more or less capable of mathematical reasoning or eye/hand coordination. I think this is unlikely. Variants like skin color give an advantage in a particular region. Mental and social advantages have no such geographic constraints. People with the advantage will quickly spread the genetics outside their own group. Only extreme geographic isolation could keep advantageous adaptations out of the general gene pool. Human history is filled with tales of travel, conquest, and stranger's babies. Unjustified claims of essential differences between groups of people have been used to justify genocide. To counter this tendency, the standard of proof for assertions of fundamental differences between groups must be extremely high. I know of no evidence that there are physical differences between human groups that elevate the fundamental capabilities of any group. This is especially clear when we look at genius. Genius is characterized by some capability, which is far greater than normal. Think Leonardo da Vinci, Mahatma Gandhi, or Michael Jordan. Genius springs up around the world and cannot be characterized by family, "race" or any other factor I know of. There are musical families, but to paraphrase Aaron Copeland "There was nothing to indicate that Leonard’s parents would produce a Bernstein."

Our upbringing affects who we are, not just emotionally, but physically. There is evidence, for example, that people brought up speaking a tonal language tend to respond differently to sound than those brought up speaking non-tonal languages. In those cultures, a higher percentage of people perceive absolute pitch. Our bodies change based on our environment, but are especially malleable before adulthood. There are some abilities, like language acquisition, that fall off as we grow older.

Humans are genetically pretty homogeneous, but in values, and hence behavior, we vary greatly. Because we learn behavior from each other, values and behavior tend to be cultural. The biggest influence is family followed peer groups and finally the culture as a whole. Some societies are monogamous, some have men with multiple wives and some have women with multiple husbands. In some societies butchers are respected and prosperous. In others they are outcasts. Food taboos are so strong that it is difficult to imagine violating them. Culturally forbidden foods include fish, insects, dogs, and pigs.


Humans like to be comfortable, both mentally and physically. Most of us are comfortable with our beliefs and day-to-day actions. Marked differences make us uncomfortable, so we avoid them. When we have a choice most of us only associate with people who share much of our own outlook and behavior. This tendency divides humanity into separate groups. In every U.S. high school there are the artists and the jocks. They may share classes, but they don't share much else. As adults, when the differences are solely those of belief, we sweep them under the carpet with admonitions about not discussing religion or politics at parties. When apparent differences are physical, the separation becomes stronger. Sometimes physical difference is innate, like skin color. Other times it is cultural, like dreadlocks, ear locks, or tattoos. We use these physically identifiable differences to announce the groups to which we belong. In a group of strangers it is always comforting and sometimes essential to find allies whose actions can be anticipated and whose help will be forthcoming.

In contemporary US society we have confused and conflated notions and enshrined two false concepts. The multifaceted nature of our current groupings is often reduced to false notions of race and ethnic group. Both of these are dependent on ancestry.

Our genetic homogeneity makes the notion of race pretty much absurd. The notion of ethnicity identifies groups of people based on cultural ancestry. This seems more reasonable because humans group first into families and families are a fundamental driver of values and behavior. In the US though, this has become hashed up as well. The cultural value of individualism and laws preventing discrimination based on obvious physical and cultural traits have caused some re-mixing of groups. This shift can be seen most clearly in people whose families have been in the US for several generations. Some of my great-grandparents were ethnically Irish-American. They were strongly Catholic and associated with others of Irish descent. They knew the history of their homeland and had views about their place in it. I am several generations removed from that. In totality, my ancestors came from a number of places. I do not identify with any of those places as a homeland and my customs and habits are only dimly related to that background. My ethnic group is "Middle Class Suburban". Social pressures have isolated some groups more than others in the US. This makes "African American" or "Hispanic" seem more reasonable as ethnic groups. However, there are a great many people classed in these groups who are culturally much closer to "Middle Class Suburban" than to the stereotypical "African American" or "Hispanic” ethnic groups.

It is demonstrably true that humans band together into trust groups. Innate traits like skin color or epicanthal folds are easy markers. As a regrettable consequence, each of us tends to exclude those with innate differences as not part of our group. This is natural, but not inevitable. For example, imagine a room with two black and two white men. If one white man and one black man both have gang tattoos and one black man and one white man are both wearing expensive business suits, they will initially pair up based on clothing rather than skin color.

None of us belong exclusively to a single group and all of us are capable of forming strong associations with almost anyone. Put a group of musicians from around the world in a single room and in short order they will be forming new associations based on their shared passion for sound.

Even in groups with strong cultural mores, there will be rogues. Every society has outcasts and criminals. Some people, gangs, clans, and governments are dangerous to outsiders. That is one of the reasons that we look for cultural allies. They may help protect us from the dangerous humans. But the tendency to bond in groups is more than a need for protection. We also have a need for acceptance by others in our group. The combination of fear and the need for acceptance and protection is very powerful. A social group can manipulate individual humans to do literally anything. They will rape, torture, and murder neighbors with whom they have lived peacefully for years. They will kill themselves and their own children. That is, the very groups we rely on for protection from the dangerous humans can also transform us into those dangerous humans.

Everyone thinks they have things they will do and things they will not do. However, the power of circumstance and persuasion move these lines. Totalitarian regimes recognize this so they create programs to make everyone complicit. Right now you would not think of killing the Jew/Black/Korean/Armenian shopkeeper on the corner, but in light of the past actions of people like him, would you be willing to keep an eye on him and report suspicious activity? Would you if there were a payment? One thing leads to another. Lines are drawn between us and them. They are clearly threatening. You are one of us. You have shown it by your actions – even accepting favors or money. But your status is provisional and must be earned by showing your commitment to us. You must show your commitment to us by acting more strongly against them.

Do we always want more

This was part of a facebook conversation that I thought might have more general interest. I apologize for the lack of context. There were two strands going, one on the effectiveness of economic theory. The second, and I think more interesting, topic I paraphrase as "are humans hardwired to want more and to equate more with better".

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I have no problem with the base notions that economists have come up with. They are extremely valuable. Supply/demand and the notion of marginal utility seem to explain some basic facts about humans as economic animals. The elaboration of those concepts into mathematics with the attendant simplifications is also fine by me, as long as the basic shortcomings are acknowledged. Unfortunately, certain brands of economists (pure free market capitalists) have hijacked the political discussion by making their value judgements into articles of political faith, partly on the basis of "science and mathematics".

On the basic question of more equals better in the human animal, I think the jury is out. Even if we accept more is better, what we want more of is quite malleable.

It is quite clear that virtually all human groupings larger than tribes establish social hierarchies and that social status is announced by appearance and behavior. It is also clear that in many groups, displays of wealth are associated with high social status. Wealth is often associated with a surplus of labor. In the middle ages, kings might have torch holders at a feast. This was not because the wall sconce was not invented. On the Yap islands, large carved stone discs served served as currency. The value of a stone was largely associated with the difficulty of acquiring it.

Social status is not always associated with material goods though. In academic circles status comes with papers, citations, and awards. In religious communities it can come with piety, prayer and even asceticism. These are cases where the hierarchy is disconnected from wealth. Hereditary social status is often associated with wealth, but the existence of sumptuary laws shows us that higher social classes (typically hereditary) may try to eliminate the advantage of wealth to maintain their own status.

Within the larger social hierarchy, both religious and academic social status often exist side by side with wealth or hereditary social status. That indicates that while social status is important, it need not be wealth based.

Even if we accept displays of wealth as indicators of status, what we spend our money on is almost completely arbitrary. Take fashion. The codpiece shows us that people can make anything fashionable.

To Michael's point on advertising. There are two ways that advertising can be effective. One is to channel existing notions of desirability into a particular product. For example, when I want a drink, advertising can influence my decision to get a Coke instead of a Pepsi or water. Thirst is the need, and advertising changes the choice, not the need.

The second way advertising can be effective is to create a new sense of need. That is, it changes the utility function rather than just directing it. The current market for diamonds in jewelry is an existence proof that this is possible. This should be a textbook case in marketing. Diamonds are sparkly and pretty. They have been used in jewelry for several thousand years. Through advertising, the De Beers company manufactured the diamond as the standard engagement ring. They controlled supplies and were able to create an artificial scarcity. This both increased the price and fed into the notion of giving a valuable engagement ring as a symbol. Now that synthetic diamonds are increasing in size and quality, they have added "natural" to the marketing. You must give a "natural" stone even though an electron microscope may be required to decide whether a given stone is natural.

Research shows that when you take a school class, the specifics of the subject are quickly forgotten. What is remembered are the basic concepts, the shape of the world. Advertisements are the same way. This is what allows Coke ads to be effective without mentioning any attributes of the product. What comes through, the shape of the world, is that Coke is part of good times with friends and family.

For commerce as a whole, the basic shape of the world is that things make the world better (which is often quite true) and that having the latest, most full featured, most stylish thing is fulfilling (which is often not true).

I personally believe that there has been a concerted commercial effort in the United States to base almost all social status on wealth and the conspicuous consumption of goods, many of which are designed either by manufacture or fashion to become obsolete quickly. I am not suggesting that this is a conspiracy, just that it makes economic sense for every business to increase the desirability of its products. In a world of mass media, non-economic spheres have less effective incentives and means.

Losing Contact

Like everyone else, my world view is limited and filtered by my own experience. Like everyone else, when there is no available, reliable research I form opinions based on my particular, atypical experiences.

Based on surveys, I have to accept that about twenty percent of adults in the US smoke. My personal experience says it is about five percent because the group of people I interact with day to day are generally non-smokers and the smokers tend not to smoke around me.

I bring this up because I feel a cultural change, but have only the most personal and anecdotal evidence. It strikes me that, day to day, I have less and less genuine human contact, both physical and emotional. I am sure some of this has to do with time of life, particular circumstance, and the softening effect of memory. Despite this, I feel there is a genuine cultural change for the worse in the United States.

Years ago when our family was smaller and very young, we moved to Oregon. This was to a small city. We arrived with nothing but the names of some friends of friends. During the three years we lived there, we developed a set of close friends and companions. I was trying to work as a musician and formed contacts in that community. We formed bands of convenience and played the local taverns and coffee shops. There were day jobs for money, but we spent as little time as possible there because our real lives were elsewhere. I helped people build additions, move, attended births and birthday parties and do all the other quotidian things without the thought of payment or trading labor. We were just in it together. There were parties and saunas and music and love. I don't remember censoring what I thought or said with these people. I'm sure that some folks were put off and probably pulled away, but there were enough left for a small community.

I contrast that to my current situation. My monetary work takes virtually all of my waking hours. Due perhaps to a poor choice or poor opportunity, my commute is quite long. A typical day involves getting up at 5:10am. By 5:30 I am in a spinning class at the local gym. After that I shower, dress and commute to work. At work there is no real communal area and I typically eat lunch alone at a nearby shopping mall. My day is largely spent in work meetings, large and small. Although I am constantly talking with people, it is all work related. I do not get home until about 7:00pm, quite exhausted.

At work, I do not speak freely. Some time ago I made a small, very bad, joke on an email received by everyone in our office (probably sixty people). Some people in management thought that such a joke might be construed by someone as offensive. As far as I can tell, no one actually complained, but some folks fantasized they might. I read and re-read the message and could find no basis for any rational complaint, but I complied with the request to send an apology saying that such communication had no place in our office.

I am more aloof than most people and I see friendships develop and grow in the workplace but I am guarded. I simply do not trust that the organization has my or my colleagues best interests in mind. As a manager, I try to protect the people who work for me, but the day may come where I am asked to do things that injure them. Most of my bosses seem to accept the notion that the primary purpose of our work is to monetarily advance the organization as a whole. I like the people I work with. I respect them. I think the institutions we have created force us apart rather than bringing us together.

In the past few years sending work off-shore has been a common topic of management discussion in several jobs I have had. It generally occurs as almost a spreadsheet computation: cost of labor versus inefficiencies in communication and the cost of developing requisite skills in people far away. In talks about pay we speak of being competitive. Work benefits are a way keep talented people from defecting to other jobs. There are career development programs and birthday reminders, but I feel the underlying sentiment that we are not dealing with friends or even people, but with labor units. Labor units that should be developed and trained and respected, but the basic notion is economic utility. The purpose of the organization is to earn money for the owners. In my current job, the owners want good economic results so they can cash out by selling the company to someone else.

Frankly, I do not think economics should form the basis for our work lives or any other part of our lives. We require money to live and our lives must make sense economically. Work must make money, but that does not mean that money should form the basis of work. Work can be centered around helping others. It can be centered on a common sense of purpose and making something bigger than one person. It can center on doing things no one has done before or better than anyone has ever done them before. It can provide community and a way to help each other.

My reaction to my work brings me distance rather than closeness to others. This is, of course, my reaction. Others may react differently, but I do not think my experience is uncommon.

I sometimes look at movies as a window onto different times and places. A couple of good examples are the original (1951) "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys of Sudan".

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" is a good story but mostly I like to contrast the everyday life that is portrayed with current life in the US. A human looking alien is loose in Washington. This apparently well educated and intelligent may chooses to live in a boarding house where he finds good middle class folks. (As a side note, Thomas Jefferson, Jon Marshall and Aaron Burr all lived in boarding houses while in Washington DC.) A single mother and her son (12 years old?) live in the boarding house as well. Within a few days the mother trusts the new boarder well enough to have him look after her son. The son has the run of Washington and is allowed to roam by himself. This setting is not the point of the movie and I do not believe that reviewers of the time commented on the lives portrayed. This was simply the texture of the time.

"God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys of Sudan" is the story of some remarkable Sudanese men. Due to war in Sudan, thousands of children were forced to flee, without any adults, across thousands of miles to refugee camps in Kenya. In Kenya they lived in refugee camps run by the UN where they created their own goverment and were schooled. Their lives were confined to the camps and they developed an extremely close knit society based on personal contact, trust and loyalty. The film introduces us to several of these young men given the opportunity of moving to the US. These are remarkable people. When we meet them they have not only survived their epic flight from Sudan, they are also remarkably well educated. Each speaks at least two or three languages.

For them, the US is a land of opportunity and provides a chance for more education and money that they can send to their community back in Kenya. It is not particularly mentioned in the film, but you see this group of men who completely depended on each other in Kenya become a fragmented group of individuals who share the same apartment, but spend no time together. Their communal life is simply shattered by the reality of contemporary American life. I do not believe that they would choose to go back, but as an observer the tragedy and loss are stark.

It is about time for me to change my life to bring it more closely into line with my values. More on this later.

Sometimes Common Sense Doesn't Make Sense

Sometimes sensible sounding positions make little sense. Here are two radically different examples. The first is helping birds by keeping your cats inside. The second is using intensive user testing to improve products.

First let's look at bird populations and cats. Many species of birds, particularly songbirds are in trouble Disappearing Common Birds Send Environmental Wake-up Call. It is also true that cats are tremendous predators. By some estimates cats kill hundreds of millions of birds in the US each year. The conjunction of these facts leads to a call that owners should keep their cats indoors Give Birds a Break, Lock up the Cat.

There may be good reasons to keep your cat indoors (though I haven't found one that convinces me), but bird killing is not one of them. It is a sop that makes people feel better without addressing the real problems.

Almost every article that seriously looks at bird loss talks about loss of habitat as the main threat. This includes the Washington Post, the Audobon Society and even Australian scientists.

My city is about seven miles on a side. Inside this area of about fifty square miles, there are essentially no native species. Fifty square miles of prairie grassland was bulldozed and replaced with asphalt, houses, stores, Kentucky Bluegrass and non-native trees. It is a nice enough town, but it does not provide much habitat for native birds.

The range of a cat is on the order of thirty or forty hectares. That is roughly a third of a mile on a side. If my city is a square seven miles on a side, cats extend each side by a maximum of about one third of a mile. The amount of severely disturbed land goes from forty nine square miles to about fifty three square miles. This is less than a ten percent increase. Complaining about bird loss due to urban cats is like killing a deer with your car and worrying about its broken antler.

Suppose that cats were a main cause of bird disappearance. Keeping your cat indoors will still not solve the problem. About one third of all cats are feral. Cats breed prodigiously and feral cats exist because there is an ecological niche for them. Even if all owned cats were kept indoors, the birds would keep dying.

I use cats and birds as an example, but we suffer from an epidemic of glossy arguments that may not stand up to any real scrutiny. A second, less supported, example has to do with product development.

It seems sensible that if you are developing products to meet some consumer need, it would be a good idea to know what those consumers want and how they will react to you product. There are a number of established techniques for this. For example, focus groups. Software organizations, often talk about user centered design.

I have developed products using these techniques. I can honestly say that every in-depth interaction I have had with customers has changed my view of the product I was developing. Sometimes I have found out that my view of the problems and their solutions is quite different from my customer's. Sometimes I have found that users had much less tolerance of complexity than I imagined.

That said, I don't think this kind of external facing, user centered process develops better products.

To support this you need only compare Microsoft and Apple. Both these companies have the time and money to investigate, measure, and improve their product development. Microsoft has a user centered development process. Apple has a completely different, inward focused product development system.

On the whole Microsoft products are, at best, acceptable. Commonly they are a complete mess. Just look at the appalling Microsoft Project. It has done more to ruin project management than any other single tool. Everyone uses Microsoft Word, but I can't think of anyone who actually likes the program. It is larded with obscure, mostly useless, features. Nothing is easy and the resulting documents are extraordinarily difficult to re-purpose.

On the whole, Microsoft follows the market. They re-implement what others have done and often do it worse. This pattern started with the operating system extends through their software products, and includes their hardware.

Apple, in contrast, is known as an innovative company that leads the market. Their customers don't just like the products, they love them. MP3 players with much the same functionality as the iPod existed before the iPod, but the Apple developers came up with a whole ecosystem for music. When the iPhone came out, it erased and replaced peoples ideas of how to interact with a that device in their pocket that sends and receives phone calls.

The problem may be that focusing on the views of potential users directs your attention to those views. Those views are often very restricted because most folks don't really think about what they are doing and what is possible. When you talk to a lot of potential customers, the tendency is to aim for the lowest common denominator. The end result seems to be products that serve a purpose, that most people can use, but that no one really cares about.

Like keeping cats inside to protect birds, asking customers to help develop products seems to make a lot of sense, but may not be sensible.