Category: General Thoughts

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Different Skill Sets

Nobody likes to do everything or is equally competent in all areas. I understand that and I am reminded again now that I am working in the press office.  I needed a place to stay from now until I go to Brazil and they needed someone to fill in, so that is what I am doing.  It is the kind of exciting job that they might make into a TV show.  We have urgent challenges, big personalities and short deadlines. Yesterday, for example, we worked on the press surrounding the extradition of a Mexican drug lord, statements from high level meetings and various other hot items.  It is a truly essential job but I don’t like it.

Some of my colleagues love it and I can understand why. I get to be close to important people and events and, in time, I could probably convince myself that I am an important person too. But it is a “machine bureaucracy” where you are most successful to the extent that you can maintain the integrity of the hierarchy and the procedures. 

We often speak of bureaucracies in pejorative terms, but the reason all literate human societies have developed bureaucracies is that they work wonderfully within their areas of expertise. If you need to control events there is nothing better, providing that conditions are reasonably predictable within the accountability of the bureaucracy and you have the resources to make it work. I can affirm that we have a great bureaucracy.  Nothing gets lost. Information passes efficiently through the system; decisions are made and promulgated.  The machine works. The question really is not whether or not a bureaucracy works; it does. It is rather where and when the bureaucracy is the appropriate tool for the task.*

I am able to do the work and I am willing to do it because it needs to be done. I got all that language training that I loved, so it is fair to do some of the more bureaucratic tasks.  As I said, some people love that sort of work and many think I am crazy for loving the language training. I suppose people should do the things that they do well. I will be glad when I can get back to doing the things I am better at doing, the things I like to do. It won’t be long.

* Give a man a hammer and every problem starts looking like a nail. That phrase comes from Abraham Maslow and a lot of my understanding of bureaucracy comes from Henry Mintzberg.  I don’t pretend to be a scholar on this, so this is my extrapolation from their ideas.   One problem for bureaucracy is that it grows and applies rules to inappropriate situations.  But the bigger problem is that most humans don’t adapt well to highly-rule based system.  It is essentially not a human system.   If you want to see an ideal bureaucratic system, look at a computer program.  A computer automates many of the machine bureaucratic functions, which is good, since it frees people for the tasks that they are better at doing.

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Habits of Self-Control and Self-Determination

The most successful 20% of the population behave differently from those at the bottom. They are more likely to be married, less likely to have children out of wedlock, more likely to work long hours, more likely to attend church regularly and less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol.  In 1960, there was little difference between the top and the bottom on the indicators measuring those things above. Today the differences are stark. 

There is a kind of reverse hypocrisy at work today. In the past, hypocrisy meant pretending to be virtuous while doing less virtuous in your actual behavior. Today, the most successful Americans, as a statistical group, tend to act virtuously (again by the measures above) but hesitate to be identified as doing so. I am sure that they would consider that the virtue of being non-judgmental, but it could also be seen as a failure to lead.

I heard about this and other things at a very interesting lecture at AEI by Charles Murray.  He is writing a book that tracks the relative decline of American habits. He looked at American indicators from 1960-2008. He stopping in 2008 so as to avoid data that would include the current recession and also studied only the white population to avoid making the discussion about race and also study a population that has remained more stable, i.e. fewer new immigrants. According to his data, the population of 1960 was much more alike in its habits than ours is today. For example, the rate of marriage at the top was 86% while at the bottom it was 83% – hardly a difference. Today the rate of marriage at the top has dropped little to around 83%, but at the bottom it has gone below 50%. Out-of-wedlock births are still rare at the top, but approaching 50% at the bottom.  The hours worked at the top have remained stable, actually increased a little, at the top but dropped at the bottom. Church attendance has dropped in all groups, but still remains high at the top and has dropped like a stone at the bottom.  Murray explains that church attendance correlates with other forms of “social capital” such as volunteering for PTAs, giving blood etc. 
The inflection point was 1964.  Until that time, social indicators were actually improving for all groups, but they have declined since them for people at the bottom. Murray didn’t propose any solutions. Maybe he will in his upcoming book. He pointed out a couple of obvious things that could be overlooked, however. The first is that many problems affect mostly people at the bottom. People at the top live in parts of the city or suburbs that used to be relatively crime free and still are.

Their kids go to schools that used to be good and still are. Most of the people they knew were married and still are. Most of the kids grew up in stable households and still do.The changes since the 1960s really didn’t hurt them.

There is a kind of reverse hypocrisy at work today. In the past, hypocrisy meant pretending to be virtuous while doing less virtuous in your actual behavior. Today, the most successful Americans, as a statistical group, tend to act virtuously (again by the measures above) but hesitate to be identified as doing so. I am sure that they would consider that the virtue of being non-judgmental, but it could also be seen as a failure to lead. I heard about this and other things at a very interesting lecture at AEI by Charles Murray. He is writing a book that tracks the relative decline of American habits. He looked at American indicators from 1960-2008. He stopping in 2008 so as to avoid data that would include the current recession and also studied only the white population to avoid making the discussion about race and also study a population that has remained more stable, i.e. fewer new immigrants.

According to his data, the population of 1960 was much more alike in its habits than ours is today. For example, the rate of marriage at the top was 86% while at the bottom it was 83% – hardly a difference. Today the rate of marriage at the top has dropped little to around 83%, but at the bottom it has gone below 50%. Out-of-wedlock births are still rare at the top, but approaching 50% at the bottom. The hours worked at the top have remained stable, actually increased a little, at the top but dropped at the bottom. Church attendance has dropped in all groups, but still remains high at the top and has dropped like a stone at the bottom.  Murray explains that church attendance correlates with other forms of “social capital” such as volunteering for PTAs, giving blood etc. The inflection point was 1964. Until that time, social indicators were actually improving for all groups, but they have declined since them for people at the bottom.  

Murray didn’t propose any solutions. Maybe he will in his upcoming book. He pointed out a couple of things that could be easily overlooked, however. The first is that much of problems of society affect mostly people at the bottom. People at the top live in parts of the city or suburbs that used to be relatively crime free and still are.  Their kids go to schools that used to be good and still are. Most of the people they knew were married and still are. Most of the kids grew up in stable households and still do. The changes since the 1960s really didn’t hurt them.

Another thing he pointed out was the increasing sorting. People increasingly have choices. Colleges have gotten good at choosing smart people. They meet each other and marry each other, producing families with advantages of good habits, sound incomes and whatever advantages of talent nature has provided. The opposite applies to people on the other end.

Murray illustrated the changes with the people in the room. Older people – like me – are much more likely to have grown up in “non-elite” households. We still remember living in working class or farm communities. Many of us were among the first in our families to graduate from college. The young people in the room – our kids – grew up in families with college educated parents. They have no personal memories of anything but the educated, well-off lives. Our sorting methods work too well today. Ironically, relying on merit and making opportunity widely available will end up sorting people by talent and habits, locking in advantages.

Finally, Murray made the comparison to the Roman Empire, but not the usual one of decline. He pointed out that the Roman Empire continued to grow in power and glory after it lost the old republican virtues. He is right.

The apogee of Roman power came during the time of Trajan and Hadrian, more than 150 years after the fall of the Republic and even longer since the decline of traditional Roman “virtues” or what we might call Roman “exceptionalism.” America may well remain a powerful country w/o our traditional virtues. But we may well lose our exceptional abilities for self-government and self-determination, things Murray calls the American project, which has been with us since the founding of our Republic. Murray thinks this is worth saving, but he admits that Imperial Rome in the Second Century was a more orderly, prosperous and peaceful place than it had been under the Republic. Empires can be good at running things, but they do this by dispensing with freedom.   

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Sometimes Too Much, but Never Enough

I attended the Washington Energy Seminar at the Department of Energy over the last three days.  We had three days of talks about fossil fuels, alternatives, nuclear and conservation. It was one of the better seminars that I have attended. I wrote us some notes and will put them in later posts, but as an introduction I have to assert my belief that we do not have an energy problem that can be solved by technology, conservation or anything else. Our energy use is based on our collective and individual preferences and the options available. 

We are constrained in our use of energy almost entirely by its cost. Everything else is just commentary.  As energy becomes more plentiful, we find new uses for it.  A recent study shows that over three centuries individuals have spent about the same amount of money (relative to time and income) over all those years.  In centuries past, we got a lot less for our earnings; put another way, we had to work a lot more for everything.  In terms of light provided, candles, manufactured in the old ways, was a lot more expensive than our modern light bulbs.  People in the old days were very careful with candles.  As artificial light became cheaper, people started to find new places where it was “needed.”   More recently, we see that when cars become more fuel efficient, people drive more.  

Most of us seem to have some kind of mental accounting that tells us how much we should spend on various things. For example, we might think that $25 a week is a good amount to pay for gas.  When gas gets more expensive per gallon, we find ways to use less.  When it gets cheaper, we find reasons to drive more. The behavior change doesn’t come immediately, but it is quick. Economists call this the rebound effect. It can swamp improvements that merely conserve.  (It also, BTW, helps explain why we don’t always feel better off when we are objectively better off.)

The perhaps unwelcome but very simple lesson is that price matters. If the price of gas goes up, people seek out alternatives or cars with better mileage. If the efficiency of cars goes up w/o a price rise, people drive more to make up for it.

The big reason we have trouble conserving energy is that the human habit of mental accounting plays directly into the weaknesses and biases of our politicians, who love to pass new rules that promise cost-free solutions. I have been interested in energy and environmental issues since I was in HS, forty years ago. As long as I can remember, politicians have promised to end the energy “crises” with all sorts of calls for research, standards and breakthroughs.  Actually, whatever happened worked. U.S energy use per unit of GDP (energy intensity) has declined by about 1.7% a year for the last 60 years, better than the world average.  We have all the energy we need, but we will never have enough “affordable” energy.

The picture up top is the Department of Energy, taken from the Smithsonian Garden. It is one of those 1960s buildings. It looks better in the picture than it does in real life. I don’t much care for the concrete buildings. I prefer the nicer old brick.  The next photo is from the same spot just looking the other way. Notice it is almost spring time. It will take only one warm or two days to get the magnolias to flower.

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Yes, We Have no Bananas

We go through phases in my work where we spend way too much time fighting rumors and accusations.  It rarely seems to do much good.  People believe all sorts of silly things, sometimes things that if true would violated the laws of physics, but they believe them. Attacking rumor with mere truth is sometimes worse than doing nothing.  Our comments are taken as confirmations of the rumor. After all, the old saying goes that “where there is smoke, there is fire,” and many people seem to figure that strenuous denials indicate that something important has come out.  “Fair” people will look at both sides with equanimity, thinking that the truth must be in the middle.  It rarely is. If you see a discussion between someone who believes the world is flat and one who tells you it is round, they both do not have good arguments and you should not conclude that truth lies in the middle, maybe earth is shaped like a cough lozenge.

Human belief is a complicated system.  I have come to understand that there are some arguments you cannot win, no matter how much truth you possess. The way to prevail is  to run around them.  Bring the weight of attention onto something else.  Change the frame.  These are all things smart persuaders do, yet we still get stuck in the denial game.  Sometimes we have to play that game, but it should be low key. Put the facts out there, but don’t play on that unfair field.  My personal favorite tactic is to get someone else to ridicule the opponent’s stand, but this is hard to do and can created backlash.

I read a good article about this recently in the Economist explaining that some researchers from Kellogg School of Journalism & at Stanford have come up with research that shows with some academic rigor what public affairs professionals know is a rougher and more intuitive fashion.   

The researchers experimented by planting rumors among undergraduates.  With each repetition, they found that skepticism diminished, increasing the chances that the students would believe them.  So what do you do?   The best thing to do is flood the zone with positive messages.   This takes the fuel out of the rumor fire.

Early in my career, I read a book by Herb Schmertz, the head of PR at Mobile. It was called “Goodbye to the Low Profile.”  As his title implies, Schmertz advocated a kick-ass relationship with critics. He felt that businesses were letting their adversaries get away with attacking them and it was not working for them.  There were lots of rumors and innuendo spread about energy companies, then as now.  Schmertz mentioned one dramatic example of countering disinformation, when he described how Mobile debunked the myth that energy companies had tankers full of oil just outside American harbors waiting for prices to rise. Mobile took journalists up in helicopters and challenged them find them.   Of course, they couldn’t.  

Schmertz never really solved the problem free riders. Everybody in the industry benefits when somebody takes on critics, but the firm that does the heavy work not only has to pay the expense of the counterattacks, but also makes itself a target for activists and is likely to bring in political pressure.  Most firms opt to keep as quiet as possible and hope that the false charges don’t cost them too much.  The idea of a “good news flood” addresses this.  It doesn’t provide much of an opportunity to counter attack and it can be justified as image building or even advertising.

The thing I remember most about the book was the saying “Yes, we have no bananas.” Schmertz chose the words from an old and familiar song. (I remember it sung by Jimmy Durante, but evidently it was a big song by many.)  The fact that I still remember it shows the usefulness of a memorable handle. That was one lesson I took.  But the underlying explanation was also useful. The idea is that you always bridge from the negative to the positive. If you say, we don’t have any bananas; it is just a negative statement.  “Yes, we have no bananas” says the same thing.  But it brings a little positive levity. Nobody is fooled, but it takes the edge off.

The good news flood is a more effective and practical way to do this. It frustrates critics, since if done well it changes the game and marginalizes them.  Sometimes they are honesty angry because they think you are not answering their questions, but nothing says you have to do that. There are always many ways to look at anything.  Their way is only one and probably not the best. When I read more on the subject of persuasion, I found out that this was called reframing or redirecting.  It is a potent tool, especially if you actually have good news to tell.  You don’t have to take the frame you are handed and you should always test any frame for validity. Some questions cannot be answered satisfactorily as stated. The classic example is when you are asked to answer yes or no to the question, “Do you still beat your wife.” An even more pernicious formula is when you are asks something like, “Why do you hate [name the group]? There is no way you can bring facts to bear on those subjects. The questioner knows this. It is not honest.   If you have to respond, talk over him/her to a wider audience.

Reframing is in order.

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Food TOO

They seemed to be going in opposite directions. The report I watched on “Globo Rural” talked about transgenetic crops. Much of the soy produced in Brazil (in the U.S. too, BTY) is genetically modified. The reasons are clear. It is easier to grow. One farmer in the State of Parana explained why he went completely over to genetically modified soy. He could use a lot less fertilizer, almost no herbicides or pesticides and he did not have to run his machines in his fields nearly as much.   

Transgenetic foods are labeled with a “T” in a triangle, so that consumers can recognize them. Evidently some people don’t like them as much and so are willing to pay more for non-T-modified products. Non-T foods are also sold to the EU. People there, no doubt egged on by strong domestic interest groups, want non-T products and are rich enough to pay the higher prices. I am not really sure about that term non-modified, since all the field crops we grow are significantly modified by plant breeding. I chose to use that instead of “natural” since they are also very far from whatever ancestor they had in nature. This leads me to the second article.

The second report on “Jornal Nacional” talked about organically grown food and labels proving that the food on the shelves is organic. 

To some people this means natural, but all that it really means is that the farmer did not use synthetic fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides.AND for the time being “organic” does not include foods genetically modified by specific biotechnological means. This distinction is also important, since almost all the foods we eat are genetically modified.All the apples you eat, for example are from clones.Apples do not breed predictably.The only way to guarantee a red delicious apple is to clone it.Every one of the red delicious apples (or other varieties as well) are the identical tree, genetically). But people who care about labels consider plant breeding a different category.

People favor organics for a variety of reason. Some people think the organic products are better for them.  Others say the organic products taste better. (This could be true, although probably more because organics often are grown by smaller, local operators who can cater to tastes.)  But a big part of the choice is that organics are perceived to be better for the environment. This last is not true. 

Organic farmers tend to be less productive (per unit of labor and land) than those who use a wider variety of techniques. I don’t want to make too big a distinction between organic and non-organic. Much of “non-organic” production, BTW, is very organic.  Dairy farmers, for example, produce and use tons of organic manure and most farmers follow rotations, planting nitrogen fixing legumes, for example, which add nutrients and organic materials to the soils. No farmer uses only synthetic methods. The difference is the organic farmer will not use any synthetic products in addition to organic ones. This makes them less productive, which is why organic products cost more.  But the environmental cost is harder to understand.  Less productivity means that more labor and land must be used to produce the same amounts of food, which means more land must be cultivated, leaving less land in a “wild” state. 

It seems to me that one of the best ways around this dilemma would be transgenetic crops.  As the farmer in Parana said, he chose to plant transgenetic soya because he could use less fertilizer, less herbicide, less pesticide and he needed to use his machines less in the field, i.e. burned less fossil fuel in the cultivation of his crops.   It seems like a win-win to me. 

Transgenetic crops can be very good for the environment since they require less of all the inputs that currently cause concern. Properly deployed, transgenetic crops could solve, or at least address the problem of lower yields for so-called organic crops. Something that produces more, on less land, with fewer inputs of fertilizer, herbicides & pesticides and lets farmers use less fossil fuel should be welcomed, don’t you think? Maybe we should come up with a new category that is environmentally friendly. It could include organic products and transgenetic ones that use fewer of those inputs above.

We can call it trans-genetically- organic. How about this? We call it a Transgenetic- Organic-Operation for food production. The label can be “Food TOO.”

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I thought “the Way Back” would be just an adventure movie. It was interesting from the adventure point of view, but I thought it was even more interesting from the point of view of politics & heroism.

The main character is a Polish officer captured by the Soviets after they and the Nazis divided the country between them in 1939. The Soviets massacred many Polish officers at place like Katyn forest, so that he escaped alive was an achievement. It was a terrible time in Poland and not very good in the world in general. It sometimes seemed that the world would be divided between totalitarian communist or totalitarian Nazis, with lots of petty tyrants mixed in but not much space left for freedom. In the movie, the communists throw the guy into a Gulag on the usual communist style charges. There are scenes of the brutality. The main character and some others escape and walk all the way across Asia from Siberia to India.

It has been more than twenty years since communist collapsed in Europe and Poland led the way to freedom. The horrors of communism have faded from popular memory. It is almost impossible to believe it really happened at all. Whole populations exterminated, people thrown into camps because of their associations, class origins or just for no real reason at all. The wars of the 20th Century were bloody with industrial strength, which makes it even more astonishing that more people died from the murderous internal oppression of revolutionary socialism, like communism and its cousin Nazism,  than in all the battle associated deaths.  When the world started to wake up from that long nightmare, when the Berlin Wall fell and freedom returned to large parts of the world, our joy at the events allowed us to put aside some of the horrible memory. Few Americans have ever experienced anything even remotely like the horrors of the Soviet Union, but it is important sometimes to recall the carnage and suffering committed in the name of progress toward totalitarian utopias.

We like to think that the human race has grown past this kind of thing. People living in just societies in peaceful times can feel that way. History gets sanitized. But the study of history informs us that it good times represent just pushing back the wilderness, in limited times and geography. The demons still lurk out there and even within. World War I opened the door for lots of them and in many ways Lenin, Hitler, Stalin & Mao were made possible by the monumental disruption in the world order. With the passage of time, some of these events and personalities seem less pernicious; they become stereotypical characters, and their murderous henchmen, like Leon Trotsky or Che Guevara can even acquire a kind of radical chic.  

No matter the other merits of the movie, it helped me remember both the horror and the heroism of those who resisted tyranny and ultimately brought it down and also the dangers of revolutionary change. The mostly peaceful general collapse of communism in Eastern Europe may have made us too optimistic. In a place like Poland, it happened smoothly as power moved to a well-prepared and civilized opposition. Despite the past, there were no significant reprisals. As I write this, we are witnessing potential revolutions in the Middle East. I don’t know the details and I certainly cannot predict the future. But I am afraid that behind the revolutions there, there is no Geremek, Onyszkiewicz, Mazowiecki or Wałęsa. I am not sure what the historical analogy will be. When the Iranians knocked down the Shah, worse and more persistent tyranny followed. Just knocking down tyranny is not enough. Some will be there to pick up the pieces. Good does not always get there first with the most. The good people are not always the best organized and the violence, exhilaration and power associated with revolution can corrupt even the best people.

There is no solution to this or a formula that will work all the time. In the times of wrenching change, a lot depends on personalities and luck. Would our post-revolution been so successful w/o men like George Washington?  If the Germans had not “imported” Lenin back into Russia, might their revolution been more moderate and less horrible?  The farther we get from events, the more they seem to have been destined to unfold as they did, but nothing is determined.

Returning to the prosaic, “the Way Back” is a good movie, worth going to see. You can enjoy it as an adventure film and a tale of adversity & triumph and if it makes you think, so much the better.  Colin Ferrell does a great job of playing a murderously dangerous and dumb but somehow likable man.  Ed Harris always does a good job. And Jim Stugess, who plays the Polish officer in the main role, portrays an honorable and determined man in an almost impossibly challenging position. See the movie.

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New Classics

Who would have thought it? A new edition of Polybius in Loeb Classics. The first edition came out in 1922.  According to the preface of the new edition, the translator, a WR Paton, died in 1921 before really finishing the work, but the editors figured it was good enough, so they went to print. It was good enough until 1964, when the editors decided to contract another guy to polish it up. Unfortunately, work did not proceed really quickly.  In the 1970s the demand for classics was not what it used to be and the project was put on hold. For reasons not explained, in 1993, the fortunes of Loeb improved and work resumed. It was finished in 2009, so now we have the pleasure of a revised edition of Polybius.

Loeb Classics feature the classical language original, in the case Greek, on the left page with the English translation on the other page. That matters not so much to me anymore. I cannot read any of the Greek.  I bought the book more for nostalgia than for actual reading. Polybius was the first Greek author that I studied in depth, when I had the seminar in Polybius at the University of Wisconsin.  

I couldn’t afford my own copy (Loeb Classics were expensive) so I used the library, where it was on permanent reserve at the Greek & Latin reading room. Yes, we had such a place. It was down in the basement at Memorial Library. You would never go down there or find the place by accident. There was the musty smell of old paper. I remember there was a giant Greek-English dictionary on a pedestal table in the middle of the room. We always called it a lexicon instead of dictionary. I am not sure if there is a difference. I spent many hours down there, I was often there alone and the place was quiet. Quiet as a tomb seemed to fit. The wall of the nearby bathroom had erudite graffiti.

A couple years ago I tried to go down there again to see if the Greek & Latin reading room was still there, but they wouldn’t let me in. The guard – yes they had a guard – told me that outsiders couldn’t just go into the library, since I had no current connection to the university. Evidently weirdos were hanging around and I couldn’t convince them that the desire to see the Greek & Roman reading room wasn’t something that a weirdo would do. I understand the need for security, but I liked the idea that libraries could be open.

Polybius was a good author for a not-so-talented classics scholar. His Greek is relatively easy to read, since he wrote in simple declarative sentences. Reading Polybius was a kind of a double payoff. He wrote in Greek but he wrote about the rise of Rome. As I said, I won’t be reading the Greek at all, nor do I intend to read even too much of the English.  Buying the book fulfills and old desire.

I read the introduction and the Polybius’ own comments on the importance of history. It reminded me of the old days (both my own and the much older ones Polybius wrote about.)  He says “…the surest and indeed the only method of learning how to bear bravely the vicissitudes of fortune is the recall the calamities of others.”  It sounds a little like a schadenfreude advice, but I think that is an artifact of the phrasing and maybe the translation.   Maybe a better paraphrase could be “when we look back at the experience of other times and places, our problems don’t seem so tough.”

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Useful Comparisons

I like to look at maps, but maps can be deceptive. They might lead us to believe that countries that cover a big area are more important. You can also be deceived by prominence in the news. An interactive map from the Economist puts in some perspective. Giant Russia has a GDP the size of Texas and oil rich Saudi Arabia is no richer than Massachusetts.

Your perspective changes when you look at the map that compares population. Saudi Arabia has a Texas sized population, even if it doesn’t manage Texas style prosperity. Cameroon has a population as big as New York’s. New York’s GDP partner is Australia.

Countries like Sweden and Finland would fit in well as states in both terms of population and GDP. Sweden has a GDP about the size of North Carolina with a similar sized population. Finland has a GDP about the size of Wisconsin’s and a population like Minnesota. Finland, Wisconsin & Minnesota all feature clean cities, cold weather, northern forests & lots of lakes, so maybe that is appropriate.

International comparisons are always rough and the United States is especially problematic because of its unusual size, population, prosperity & diversity. The only “country” that really can be compared to the U.S. on all counts is the EU. We are often fond of the cherry picking comparisons that seem to prove a point. In fact, as we can see from the map, that the unit of comparison might often be more at the state level. I remember an interesting comparison. The GDP per capita in Germany is about the same as in Arkansas.

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The Doctor Lied-Kids Died

Kids used to die from diseases that are now preventable. Many of these diseases, such as measles & whopping cough were almost eradicated until a dishonest doctor published an article in the once reputable medical journal “The Lancet” blaming vaccines for autism. Crooked lawyers and opportunistic politicians jumped on the bandwagon. Measles is now endemic in England. California recently suffered a whooping cough outbreak that made 7,800 people sick & killed 10 babies.

This is a story with real heroes and villains. The obvious villain is “doctor” Andrew Wakefield and other researchers who used bogus data to reach dubious conclusions. Also villains are lawyers who quickly sued firms. Useful idiots are the parents who wanted to blame someone and maybe profit from their children’s suffering. I am not sure where all the celebrities and politicians belong. They may not actually be villains, but they are worse than useful idiots.

The problem is that this kind of thing happens all the time. Remember when Merrill Streep, in one of her best passionate acting voices, testified before Congress about Alar? Celebries look so good and seem so earnest that you might almost think they knew what they were talking about. Many people laid off their healthy apples for weeks or months. By the time the truth comes out, or by the time it is actually proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that even crooked lawyers cannot spin, the damage is done. It is especially fun for them to go after big firms, something like what is going on with Toyota, BTW, right now.

And one of the biggest threats to human health and safety is the ignorant attacks on the sciences of biotechnology and nanotechnology, but those are all subjects for other posts.

I had all my kids vaccinated against everything they might get. I made sure they got their meningitis shots before going away to school. I get my flu shot every year. I grew up just after polio was conquered. I remember people not much older than I was telling about the horrors. I got my immunization to chicken pox, measles and the mumps the old fashioned way, by getting the disease. I survived, but it is not a harmless thing.

You have to be pretty dumb to avoid vaccinations unless you have a specific medical reason – a real one, not one you got from the Internet. But those who avoid vaccinations are worse just dummies. They harm others. Not everybody can get vaccinated. People with compromised immune systems cannot, for example, but they are extremely susceptible to sickness. The chicken pox that just bothers you and me might kill them. They depend on all of us to NOT to be the carriers of the germs. If you bring measles or mumps etc among them, you might be killing some of these people.

Just be smart and take the jab. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for others. And if you won’t do it for others, go live someplace by yourself. You may both avoid the contagious diseases and avoid passing them to others.

References are here & here and especially here.

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The Light Bulb Goes Off

The great Ronald Reagan said that you could accomplish almost anything as long as you don’t care who gets credit. Of course Reagan was not the first person to say that. It is almost impossible to trace an idea to its “source” because there really is no one source. Ideas don’t pass unchanged through the people who hold them and none of us ever has a truly original thought, which is why we might not fight so hard to take or give credit. 

 I proudly proclaim that I have never in my life had a truly original thought. I am well educated. The chief benefit of education is that you tap into the accumulated wisdom of other people, places and other generations. I spend a lot of time reading with the specific goal of appropriating the ideas of others. I cannot keep them straight. I often cannot remember where I picked them up and I mix them together in ways that complicate provenance. It doesn’t bother me, although I suppose that some people of deceive themselves about their own originality might be upset that I “stole” their ideas. Footnotes have always been a challenge for me. 

The image of the lone genius coming up with a great breakthrough was always mostly mythical. Innovative ideas are created when they bounce off and recombine with each other. (Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist characterizes it as ideas having sex and producing synergistic offspring. His book, BTW, is among those I have assimilated in the Borg-like fashion I mentioned above.) They do not do well when they are contained in a single mind, the more people involved in an idea, the better.

I have little patience with the careful parsing of credit. That is a reason I had to flee academia, where the first ¾ of any research consists of summarizing and discussing the lineage of all the ideas you will be considering in the second-last paragraph of your thesis. It is just an awful long run for a very short slide and beyond that it does not reflect how people think or ideas are born outside the ivory tower.

Let me break my credit rule again by referring to another book I recently read called Where Good Ideas Come From. If you follow the link, you will find a good illustrated summary of the main ideas of the book, which saves me the need to write it all down here. The summary does not include, however, the point that in an academic sense I would give him credit for. That is that many people have similar ideas when faced with similar challenges and similar opportunities. Of course, this is not a new idea. I wrote a post with some of the same thoughts before I read the book and I think before the book was published. It kind of proves the point about ideas flowing around.

You can also look at the TED Lecture. If you are unfamiliar with TED lectures, you might want to take a look; they are usually interesting. On an unrelated note, one of my favorites was on the intelligence of crows.

Johnson gives some good examples. The most famous is probably Darwin and Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution completely independently about the same time. The idea was gestating around in general at the time. Thinking up the theory was made possible by scientific advances that made analysis of species possible, by floods of communications that spread that knowledge and, not inconsequentially, by the society that had developed in the West that would not stone or burn anybody who published such ideas as infidels or heretics. In short, a person living in the 15th Century anywhere in the world or even living in the 19th Century anyplace else probably could not have thought of the details of the theory of evolution at all or, if he had managed the thought, would have died in a nasty way shortly after revealing it to anybody else.

When I studied anthropology and ancient history, we used to refer to diffusion. This was the concept that ideas and technologies were created in some place, in ancient history usually the Mesopotamia or Anatolia, and then they were carried – diffused – to other parts of the world. This led to a linear type of history, where your attention is first drawn to Sumer in southern Mesopotamia and then you move the “center” of civilization to northern Mesopotamia, expand it to include the Eastern Mediterranean, then to Greece, then Rome. After that you move to the Empire of the Franks, then to England and finally you end up in America.

Of course, I am conflating diffusion with an ethnocentric historical perspective, but diffusion is essentially an ethnocentric historical perspective and it is based on that bogus concept that ideas are invented and then spread, rather than the more correct one that ideas spread and then they are invented. (This diffusion thing gets even worse, BTW. Some people believe that space aliens came around and “seeded” ideas)

It is not exclusive. It is likely that people in different places, faced with similar challenges and opportunities came up with similar adaptations. It is also likely that when they came in contact with other ideas the mixed, matched and innovated. So did the use of particular tools, pottery or agricultural techniques spread through diffusion from originating centers or did they develop in many places at once? The answer is yes.

So the academic exercise of trying to find the “origins” can be fun, but it is isn’t much use.

Next year we will essentially outlaw the traditional incandescent light bulb, and with it the long-time symbol of innovation and new ideas. We all learned that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but there are always wise guys who point out that he didn’t. They are right. The Greeks invented light bulbs almost 3000 years ago. The problem is that they didn’t work. Who had the basic idea first doesn’t really count for much. It matters who can make it work and make it useful. The greatest innovators are not those who have the best new ideas, but rather those who can figure out how to make ideas work for themselves and others and those who can reformulate ideas into new mixes.

All ideas are old in their basic form. I am convinced that the Greeks, Chinese or Native Americans (if you want to be PC) pretty much thought of everything on a basic level. If you want to say that the concept of a chariot of the gods is essentially the same as the space shuttle, you are being silly and impractical but you have a nerdly rhetorical point. Just don’t take that kind of thing to seriously and don’t get annoyed when you don’t get credit for having useful ideas.