Modern Dragons

Neuro musings, part 1: neurobiology, psychology, and the missing link(s)

2009-11-12T01:01:00.005-06:00

I'm flying out to Salt Lake City tomorrow for a month of thinking about neuroscience; I process ideas by writing, so I'm kicking off an open-ended series of pieces dealing with the stuff I'm thinking about.

Part 1: neurobiology, psychology, and the missing link(s)

The central problem of neuroscience is that despite all the advancements happening in medical science, we have embarrassingly few ways to quantify, or talk quantitatively about, mid-level functional differences between peoples' brains.

It's not that we have no tools at all for quantifying function and individual differences: we can draw correlations between specific genes and certain behavioral traits or neurophysiological features. We have the DSM IV (and soon, DSM V) as a sort of handbook on the symptoms of common brain-related problems. We have the Myers-Briggs and related personality-typing tests, we have psychometric tests, we have various scans that pick up gross neuroanatomy (and we can sometimes correlate this with behavioral deficits), and we have the fMRI, which can measure raw neural activity through the proxy of where blood flows in the brain.

The problem is that these methods of understanding brains are heavily clustered in two opposite areas: the reductionist neuroanatomical approach, which is great as far as it goes, but doesn't go far enough up the ladder of abstraction to explain much about everyday behavior, and the symptom-centric psychological approach, which may be a great description of how various people behave, or some common neural equilibria, but really explains very little.[1] There's a great deal of room in neuroscience for an ontology with which to talk about, and mid-level tools which attempt to measure and correlate things with, this underserved middle-level of brain function.[2]

Of course, the natural question regarding these mid-level approaches to understanding the brain is whether we can find ontologies and tools which can be said to "carve reality at its joints," or not be based on a terribly leaky level of abstraction (as, for example, the DSM IV fails at), yet have direct relevance to psychological events as we experience them in ourselves and in others (as, for example, the DSM IV does). I don't have any answers! But I do have ideas.

[1] To paraphrase Sir Karl Popper, implicit in any true explanation of a phenomenon is a prediction, and implicit in any prediction about a phenomenon is an explanation. So a good way to figure out how much of a field is true scientific explanation vs. 'mere stamp-collecting' is to check how much it deals with predictions, whether explicit or implicit. Psychology seems to be a primarily descriptive field that's attempting to translate its rich (yet predictively shallow) descriptive ontology into a more prediction-based science.

[2] I realize this is somewhat vague. I plan to expand this description of what I think of as "mid-level functional attributes" and the sorts of concepts and tools I think may be useful for dealing with them. One example of a mid-level measurement that struck me as promising was a work correlating lack of microstructural integrity in the uncinate fasciculus with psychopathy.

HIC SVNT DRACONES

2009-11-11T02:02:00.006-06:00

The new site redesign is now live! Thanks to some beautiful artwork by my friend Corby, and some ugly html hacks by me, Modern Dragons now features a dragon. Speaking of which, it's high time to answer the question:

What's a Modern Dragon anyway?

Back in the Middle Ages, cartographers used to (anecdotally, at least) mark unknown or dangerous territories on their maps with the Latin phrase, HIC SVNT DRACONES-- literally, "Here be Dragons". By metaphor, then, the purpose of this blog is to locate, explore, and perhaps take a swing at the analogous dragons in our modern age-- the puzzles, frontiers, and dangerous elements within science, culture, and this terribly uncertain future of ours.

Quote: on the evolution of reading

2009-09-30T14:17:00.005-05:00

Here, I am reminded not of the recent past but of a huge change that occurred in the middle-ages when humans transformed their cognitive lives by learning to read silently. Originally, people could only read books by reading each page out loud. Monks would whisper, of course, but the dedicated reading by so many in an enclosed space must have been an highly distracting affair. It was St Aquinas who amazed his fellow believers by demonstrating that without pronouncing words he could retain the information he found on the page. At the time, his skill was seen as a miracle, but gradually human readers learned to read by keeping things inside and not saying the words they were reading out loud. From this simple adjustment, seemingly miraculous at the time, a great transformation of the human mind took place, and so began the age of intense private study so familiar to us now; whose universities where ideas could turn silently in large minds.

Dr. Barry Smith, University of London, while discussing Edge Magazine's 2009 question, What will change everything?

Edit: a commenter has suggested it was actually St. Ambrose, not St. Aquinas, who first broke this ground.

A simple and cheap proposal for improving American health

2009-09-12T12:32:00.003-05:00

Earlier this summer a pediatrician friend of mine was asking about ideas for health care reform since Olympia Snowe was going to stop by her hospital and talk with the doctors there. Unfortunately Snowe cut her visit short, but this is what I came up with:

A simple and cheap proposal for improving American health:

In short, I'd like to see a federally-funded, state-by-state performance-based incentive program to improve public health. Specifically, the federal government sets aside a decent chunk of money and sets targets for curbing health problems: e.g., "Reduce the growth of childhood diabetes in your state by 50% by 2012" or "Reduce the growth of cardiovascular disease in your state by 40% by 2013." If state A meets the target, they get generous federal funds for doing so. If state B fails to meet the target, they don't. Ideally, this would generate a lot of creativity in actually solving the targeted problems (since real money for the state would be on the line), but states would also have incentive to copy what works.

This program might cost some money-- but we'd be paying for results: if it flopped and nobody hit these targets, well, it'd have cost nothing. On the other hand, if this program got results, even if we consider the money going to states to be 'wasted' the program would still be a net financial gain from perspective of decreased strain on our health systems. In other words, with a results-based incentive system, we have nothing to lose if it flops and plenty to gain if it works.

Now, I'm sure the devil would be in the details. We'd need to pick targets that are easy to representatively measure and hard to game. It also seems like we could have a yearly governors' conference revolving around this incentive program for states to share tips on what strategies are working and which aren't. Make this conference (and the incentive program in general) a big deal, and make it competitive-- make states proud of their successes and ashamed of their failures.

In general, it seems to me that this sort of grand state-by-state competition for funds could be extended to a lot of social problems. Since it incentivizes results instead of naive/bureaucratic thinking, it might encourage some smart, actionable analysis about the roots of various social problems. But that's something to explore another time. My point is, I think this would work really well for improving public health, and we should do it.

p.s. Anyone have a good way of getting this idea into the hands of some congressperson?

Quote: China on China

2009-08-04T13:22:00.004-05:00

Via a NY Times article on the US-China financial relationship:

Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who ushered in its market reforms starting in the late 1970s, famously gave his country the following advice: “Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.”

This seems to be the general trend in Chinese foreign policy; if the Chinese leadership decide this is no longer necessary or desirable, we could suddenly live in a very different world.

I think a particularly interesting and volatile element to this is that the Chinese Government has a relatively solid hold on power, but this hold is largely tied to the year-over-year economic growth China has been experiencing for decades. The Chinese are content to tolerate their government because life is getting better, and looks to get better still. Should this growth dry up, there's no telling what may happen domestically, or what nationalistic conflicts the Chinese Government may enter into as a ploy to unify their people.

On writing, and the beauty of archive.org

2009-07-11T12:15:00.005-05:00

If I had to put together a list of the 7 Wonders of the Internet, archive.org would most certainly be on it. It's the website of a non-profit organization which runs a huge server farm that tirelessly crawls the internet and saves what it finds. On the website, you can use their Wayback Machine to essentially turn back the clock and experience the internet frozen at a particular instant. The NY Times' website as of December, 1998? Check. Yahoo.com as of January, 2001? Check. That Geocities blog you started as an angsty teenager and later deleted in shame? Yes, probably that too.

My latest archive.org-assisted rediscovery is of a wonderful little essay on the difficulty of writing vs programming by Paul Graham. Archive.org isn't google-searchable, and so when Graham deleted his infogami blog this gem vanished down the memory hole. I'll quote it in full for your pleasure and to get it back in circulation.

Paul Graham
Why Writing is Harder than Programming

3 Oct 06

I spent most of this summer hacking a new version of Arc. That's why I haven't written any new essays lately. But I had to start writing again a few days ago because I have to give a talk at MIT tomorrow.

Switching back to writing has confirmed something I've always suspected: writing is harder than hacking. They're both hard to do well, but writing has an additonal element of panic that isn't there in hacking.

With hacking, you never have to worry how something is going to come out. Software doesn't "come out." If there's something you don't like, you change it. So programming has the same relaxing quality as building stuff out of Lego. You know you're going to win in the end. Succeeding is simply a matter of defining what winning is, and possibly spending a lot of time getting there. Those can be hard, but not frightening.

Whereas writing is like painting. You don't have the same total control over the medium. In fact, you probably wouldn't want it. When it's going well, painting from life is something you do in hardware. There are stretches where perception flows in through your eye and out through your hand, with no conscious intervention. If you tried to think consciously about each motion your hand was making, you'd just produce something stilted.

The result is that writing and painting have an ingredient that's missing in hacking and Lego: suspense. An essay can come out badly. Or at least, you worry it can.

I think good writers can push writing in the direction of Lego. As you get more willing to discard and rewrite stuff, you approach that feeling of total control you get with Lego and hacking. If there's something you don't like, you change it. At least, as I've gotten better at writing that's what's happened to me. I've become much more willing to throw stuff away.

But though you get closer to the calmness of hacking, you never get there. What a difference it is walking into the Square to get a cup of tea with a half-finished essay in my head, rather than a half-finished program. A half-finished program is a pleasing diversion-- a puzzle. A half-finished essay is mostly just a worry. What if you don't think of the other half?

It's possible that hacking is only easy because we have poor tools (and low expectations to match). Maybe if you had really powerful tools you'd tell a computer what to do in a way that was more like writing or painting. Lego, pleasing as it is, can't do what oil paint can. That would be an alarming variant of hundred year language: one that was as powerful and as frightening as prose. But that's exactly the sort of trick the future tends to play on you.

Quote: on the economic situation

2009-07-02T08:39:00.006-05:00

The biggest problem today [in our economic situation] is that nobody really knows what the value of anything is.

- Kermit Johnson

(Why yes, Dad, I *do* listen!)

Our broken grant system

2009-06-29T11:51:00.010-05:00

The New York Times has a piece up highlighting some of the fundamental flaws in the cancer research grant system. In short, they find that it tends to fund unambitious, incremental research proposals that are unlikely to fail, yet also unlikely to result in significant progress toward curing cancer. I thought this passage was particularly poignant:

“Scientists don’t like talking about it publicly,” because they worry that their remarks will be viewed as lashing out at the health institutes, which supports them, said Dr. Richard D. Klausner, a former director of the National Cancer Institute.

But, Dr. Klausner added: “There is no conversation that I have ever had about the grant system that doesn’t have an incredible sense of consensus that it is not working. That is a terrible wasted opportunity for the scientists, patients, the nation and the world.”

John Hawks has some clever and good commentary on the situation, bringing in some evolutionary theory about search space and fitness peaks to support the point that yes, we're funding the wrong sorts of grant proposals when we go for timid, incremental projects given our current state of knowledge.

A pie-in-the-sky idea

As sort of an ideal-world scenario, instead of routing all proposals through the most established and senior of scientists, I'd like to see a modest amount of future NIH funding be set aside and overseen by graduate students in seminars across the country. Essentially, students could sign up for a seminar where their coursework would be to analyze a set of grant applications pertaining to their field, learn about the science in each grant and about the grant system, and finally select the top 1-2 grants to be funded. The professor teaching the class would be in charge of the syllabus, but with the following three guidelines:

1. Attempt to choose the best grant proposals;
2. The students, not the professor, have the final say in which proposals get funded;
3. Use the class as a teaching tool for both the science involved in the grants, and the grant system itself.

The set of grant applications to evaluate could be drawn from the pool of applications the NIH has rejected, but still deems interesting and not based on bad science.

There would be a million details to fill in, but I guarantee this system would be consistently fresh and open to new ideas (I don't know if anyone has noticed this, but grad students are really smart and creative!), yet would still be grounded in science and experience. It'd also be a fantastic teaching tool.

Now leaving Era of the Mystery. All aboard for Era of the Tool.

2009-06-28T20:08:00.002-05:00

Historically, there have been three ways to make progress within a scientific paradigm:
- Solve an outstanding mystery;
- Gather and publishing new data;
- Construct a new tool.

Gathering and publishing new data has constituted, and will constitute for the forseeable future, the majority of scientific publication. Science has a healthy and voracious appetite for data, and this isn't likely to change anytime soon. The interesting thing about progress in science today though, and the topic of this post, is the balance between the first and third sort of approach, mystery vs tool.

Era of the Scientific Mystery

By and large, the emphasis in science used to be on solving mysteries. Discovering the mechanism of genetic inheritance; decoding the structure of DNA; deciphering how viruses take over cells. Scientists were billed as detectives, and the height of scientific achievement was to find an "aha" insight that solved an outstanding mystery. But- though some scientists may voraciously deny this- we've been so successful at solving the fundamental mysteries out there that we're running out of this kind of mystery in many branches of science. In turn, science is gradually becoming less about solving foundational unknowns (like decoding the structure of DNA) and more about creating tools by which to more richly and more quantifiedly understand what is no longer mysterious but too complex to trust to our intuitions and simple equations.

Era of the Scientific Tool

Scientific progress has always had a strong tool component. Grind a better lens, see the stars better, and create a more accurate description of the galaxy; build a free-swinging pendulum, observe the shifting plane of motion, and conclude the Earth is not fixed but rotates. These sort of things were not uncommon in the history of science. But there seems to be a sea change happening that modern scientific publication is beginning to center around devising and applying tools that in turn generate interesting results.

Two examples of this from my own experience are the recent publications of a couple friends who are scientists, John Hawks (UW Madison) and Bryan W. Jones (U Utah).

Hawks made waves with a recent publication, Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution, which applied an established genetics tool (linkage disequilibrium) to the context of the human genome and came to the conclusion that not only did human evolution not stop with the advent of civilization, but that it actually sped up over a hundredfold.

Jones just published A Computational Framework for Ultrastructural Mapping of Neural Circuitry, a work which defined a new integrative workflow which enabled, for the first time, the mapping of a large-scale neural connectome, and offered the first product of this workflow, a connectome map of a rabbit's retina.

Tools are absolutely central to both publications: the first is based on the novel application of an existing tool to a context it hadn't been applied in, and the second involved inventing a new tool to enable the generation of new datasets.

These examples are anecdotal, to be sure-- but it seems that although the meme of the scientific mystery will be with us for a long time, and though there are sporadic fundamental unknowns yet to discover, increasingly the really sexy, generative results in science involve creating or repurposing a tool to shed new light on some data, or generate data at an exponentially faster rate.

In short? Science is no longer about mysteries but about problems. And given the right tool, problems solve themselves.

Notes:

- Kevin Kelly's Speculations on the Future of Science is an interesting survey of possible tools science may grow into.

Brainstorm: Logarithmic Evolution Distance

2009-06-11T16:09:00.014-05:00

(This piece is sort of a continuation of a previous brainstorm on evolution and phylogeny- it was lots of fun to think through and write, and I hope it's fun to read even if a bit jargon-heavy.)

Exponential advances in gene sequencing technology have produced an embarrassment of riches: we're now able to almost trivially sequence an organism's DNA, yet sifting meaning from these genomes is still an incredibly intensive and haphazard task. For instance, consider the following simple questions:

How close are the genetics of dogs and humans? How does this compare to cats and humans? What about mice and cats? How different, genetically, are mice and corn?

We have all the necessary genomic data to answer these questions, and we can calculate answers of a sort-- but the types of answers we can give at this point are rather sparse and definitely not intuitively satisfying.

Whenever we can ask simple questions about empirical phenomena that don't seem to have elegant answers, it's often a sign there's a niche for a new conceptual tool. This is a stab at a tool that I believe could deal with these questions more cogently and intelligently than current approaches.

Logarithmic Evolution Distance: an intuitive approach to quantifying difference between genomes.

How do we currently compare two genomes and put a figure on how close they are? The fashionable metrics seem to be:

- Raw % similarity in genetic code-- e.g., "Humans and dogs share 85% of their genetic sequence." Or 70%. Or 98%, depending on who you ask. However, what does this really say? It's a non-intuitive answer, particularly since there are so many ways to calculate the figure for this, depending on how one evaluates CNVs and functional parity in sequences. And this tends to grossly understate the importance of regulatory elements.

- Gene homologue analysis-- e.g., "The dog genome has gene homologues for ~99.8% of the human genome." However, neither the magnitude nor the functional meaning of the difference between two genomes having 99% homologous genes and 99.8% homologous genes is apparent. This approach also involves deep ambiguities in assuming homologue function, in assessing what constitutes a similar-enough homologue, and in dealing with CNVs-- and this 'roll up your sleeves and compare the functional nuts and bolts of two genomes' approach is also extremely labor-intensive.

- Time since evolutionary divergence-- e.g., "The latest common ancestor of dogs and cats lived 60 MYA, vs that of dogs and humans, which lived 95 MYA. However, though time seems a relatively good proxy for estimating how far apart two genomes are, there are many examples of false positives and false negatives for this heuristic. Selection strength and rate of genetic change can vary widely in different circumstances, and thus there are reasons to believe this heuristic is often deeply and systemically biased as a proxy for genome difference.

None of these approaches really give wrong answers to the questions I posed, but neither do they always, or often, give helpful and intuitive answers. They fail the ok, but what does it mean? test.

So here's my suggestion for a new approach-
'Evolution Distance' - a rough computational/simulation estimate (useful in a relative sense) of the average number of generations of artificial selection it would take to evolve organism X into organism Y under standardized conditions, given a set of allowed types of mutations.

To back up a bit, a (rough) way to explain what this idea is about is, take some cats. Breed them. Every generation, take the most genetically doglike cats, and breed them together. Eventually(!) you'll get a dog. What this tool does, essentially, is computationally estimate how many generations of selection [edit: mutation] it would take to go from genome A (a cat) to genome B (a dog). The number of generations is this 'evolution distance' between the genomes.

Now, what makes a dog a dog? We can identify several different thresholds for success-- an exact DNA match would be the gold standard, followed by a match of the DNA that codes for proteins, followed by estimated reproductive compatibility, followed by specific subsystem similarities, and so forth. The answer would be in terms of X to Y generations, 95% Confidence Interval, in log notation like the Ricter Scale, as it could vary so widely between organisms... call it LED for Logarithmic Evolution Distance. Arbitrarily, an LED of 1 might be 1k generations, an LED of 2 would be 10k generations, etc.

E.g., the LED of a babboon and a chimpanzee might be 1.8-1.9;
Of a giraffe and a hippo might be 3.4-3.6;
Starfish and a particular strain of e. coli might be 10.2-10.4. (That's a lot!)
I'm just throwing out some numbers, and may not be in the right ballpark... but the point is this is an intuitive, quantitative metric that can scale from comparing the genetics of parent and offspring all the way to comparing opposite branches of the tree of life.

This is intrinsically a quick and dirty estimate, very difficult to get (& prove) 'correct', but given that, it is
1. potentially very useful as a relative, quantitative metric,
2. intuitive in a way current measures of genetic similarity aren't,
3. fully computational with a relatively straightforward interpretation-- you'd set up a model, put in two genomes, and get an answer.

This estimate could, and would need to, operate with a significantly simplified model of selection. Later, the approach could slowly add in gene pools, simulation & function-aware aspects, mutation mechanics, the geometry of mutation hotspots, mutations incompatible with life, gene patterns that protect against mutations, HGT, etc. But it would start as, and be most helpful as, a very rough metric.

Variations:
1. Instead of being based on random mutations and pruning, perhaps the algorithm could be tuned to map out a shortest mutational path from genome A to genome B, given a certain amount of allowed mutation per generation. This would be less indicative of the randomness of evolution, but perhaps a tighter, more tractable, and more realistic estimate of the number of generations' worth of distance. [Note- I'm coming around to the idea that this is the better approach.]

2. Depending on the progress of tissue and functional domain gene expression analysis and what inherent and epistemological messiness lies therein, this could be applied to subsets of organisms: finding a provisional sort of evolution distance between organism X's immune system and organism Y's immune system, or limbs, or heart, etc. Much less conceptually elegant, but perhaps still useful.

Practical applications (why would this be useful?):
In general, I see this as an intuitive metric to compare any two genomes that could see wide use-- after the general model is built, the beauty of this approach is that it's automated and quantitative. Just input any two arbitrary genomes, input some mutational parameters, and you get an answer. Biology is coming into an embarrassment of riches in terms of sequencing genomes. This is a tool that can hopefully help people, both scientists and laymen, make better intuitive sense of all this data.

A specific use for this would be to compare the ratio of calculated LED to the time since evolutionary divergence while controlling for time between generations. This would presumably be a reasonable (and easy-to-do) measure to detect and compare strength of selection, perhaps helpful as a supplement to e.g., metrics such as linkage disequilibrium analysis. Alternatively, if the genome of two organisms' last common ancestor can be inferred, the LED of LCA's genome->genome A vs the LED of LCA's genome->genome B would presumably be an excellent quantitative indicator of relative strength of selection.

This metric is by no means limited to comparisons between species; comparing Great Danes to Pitbulls with this tool, or even two Pitbulls to each other, would generate interesting results.

This tool would also be helpful in an educational context, to drive home the point that everything living really is connected to everything else, and evolution is the web that connects them. It's also educational in the sense that it'd actually simulate a simplified form of genetic evolution, and we may learn a great deal from rolling up our sleeves and seeing how well our answers compare to nature's.

Open questions:
- This comparison as explained does not deal with the complexity of sexual recombination or of horizontal gene transfer (though to be fair, none of its competitors do either). Or, to dig a little deeper, evolution happens on gene pools, whereas this tool only treats evolution as mutation on single genomes. Does it still produce a usably unbiased result in most comparisons? (My intuition is if we're going for an absolute estimate of an 'evolution distance', no; a relative comparison, yes.)

- Would direction matter? It depends on how simple the model is, but realistically, it's very likely. E.g., the LED of a dog -> cat might be significantly different than cat -> dog. Presumably it'd matter the most in deep, structural changes such as prokaryote <-> eukaryote evolution. Loss of function/structure is always easier to evolve than function/structure.

- How realistically could one model the conditions that these evolutionary simulations would operate under? E.g., would the number of offspring need to be arbitrary for each simulation? Would the rate of mutation vary between dogs and cats? How could the model be responsive to operation under different ecosystems? How to deal with many changes in these quantities over time, if you're charting a large LED (e.g., bacteria->cat)? I guess the answer to this is, you could make things as complicated as you wanted. But you wouldn't have to.

- In theory, the impact of genetic differences between arbitrary members of the same species would be minimized by the logarithmic nature of the metric. Would this usually be the case? Presumably LED could be used to explore variation pertaining to this: e.g., species X has a mean LED of 1.4, whereas species Y has a mean LED of 1.6.

Anyway, this is a different way of looking at the differences between genomes. Not more or less correct than others-- but, at least in some cases, I think more helpful.

Edit, 9/27/09: Just read an important paper on the difficulty of reversing some types of molecular evolution, since neutral genetic drift accumulated after a shift in function may not be neutral in the original functional context. In the context of Logarithmic Evolution Distance, I think it underscores the point that LED can't be taken literally, since it doesn't take function or fitness into account. But then again, neither do the other tools it's competing against, and this doesn't impact its core function as an estimation-based tool with which to make relative comparisons.

Brainstorm: An alternative to the tree of life

2009-05-12T13:43:00.003-05:00

One of the greatest insights of modern biology is the Tree of Life metaphor-- that all organisms share common ancestors if we go back far enough, and that we can understand a great deal about an organism based on which evolutionary forks it and its ancestors have taken.

This has been and continues to be a profoundly useful tool in nearly all subfields of biology. But it was created before we knew anything about genetics, and it's starting to show its age-- especially in the context of single-cell organisms, whose cellular machinery and evolutionary history allow organisms very far apart in the 'tree' to readily swap significant amounts of genetic material.[1] This sort of gene swapping, or Horizontal Gene Transfer, as it's called, happens in plants and animals as well-- think of mitochondria and chloroplasts, once organisms in their own right, now mere cellular power plants with much of their original genetic code shuffled into their hosts' genomes.[2] But as a rule, most HGT happens in the contexts of bacteria and viruses. And HGT is extremely common there.

So we have these concepts of distinct species and this branching tree of life, and they're incredibly useful when talking about plants and animals, but in the contexts of bacteria and viruses they become rather strained when organisms from very distant branches constantly share lots of genetic code. The core organizing assumption which gives the tree metaphor and our current phylogenic system meaning, that once organisms branch off sufficiently far from each other they can no longer share genetic code, is often false in these contexts.[3] And under many metrics, most of life's genetic diversity is contained in the bacterial and viral domains, so this is not a trivial problem.

So we can keep trying to extent the current tree metaphor, or we can start looking around for a new model.[4] I think both are worth doing.

So what would an alternative to the Tree of Life look like?

I don't have an answer to this per se, but it seems to me the way forward is to recognize the core insight of the tree metaphor- to group things that have more shared evolutionary history closer together- but to apply this insight at the level of the gene rather than the organism. Essentially, I think a new system could be built by sequencing everything and having computers crunch the numbers, identify co-evolved gene clouds, highlight the genetic links between organisms, and sort organisms based on these links.

This approach could simplify down into or replicate most of our current phylogeny in organisms with low HGT (eucaryotic organisms are mostly isolated co-evolved gene clouds which should be grouped together, and grouped near the other eucaryotic organisms they share recent history with) while leaving the door open to a more elegant treatment of the edge cases of e.g., bacteria and viruses, which may be amalgamations of distinct co-evolved gene clouds with separate evolutionary histories.

But the devil will be in the details, and creating a new phylogeny is particularly tricky in that any sorting algorithm includes contingent assumptions about what sort of answer we want when asking, what is the nature of the relation between organism X and organism Y?

It's interesting to think about. Realistically speaking, our current phylogeny is much too fundamental to most of modern biology to be replaced anytime soon. But it'll be interesting to see if and how people attempt to apply the gene-level shared history idea to patch up our current organism-level shared history phylogeny.

Footnotes:

[1] This rampant HGT happens in multiple ways: bacteria can share plasmids, which are sort of modular pieces of genetic function able to be easily swapped in and out. If one strain of bacteria develops resistance to a drug, it may share that resistance to other strains through a plasmid. Bacterial DNA is also less isolated and protected than eucaryotic DNA, so 'free floating' DNA is much more likely to be integrated into the cell.

Viruses, on the other hand, exist by hijacking existing cellular machinery to splice themselves into genomes then copy themselves, and evolve resistance by being extremely sloppy in their duplication methods, both of which can lead to significant HGT. As well, viruses are hardly limited to infecting plants and animals; those which infect bacteria and other viruses (bacteriophages and virophages, respectively) can also be vehicles for HGT.

[2] Our genomes are filled with ancient, defunct viruses who spliced themselves into our genes but then couldn't get out. Recent surveys of the human genome indicate that these defunct viruses take up more space in our genome (2%) than do actual protein-coding genes (1.4%).

Recent research indicates that this has been a useful source of genetic diversity: the mammalian placenta, for instance, repurposes genes originally from an ancient retrovirus to protect itself from being attacked by the mother's immune system.

[3] That's the conceptual argument for a new type of phylogeny. The pragmatic argument is that an infectious bacteria or virus's position on the tree of life does not tell us much about how it spreads, where in the body it can thrive, or how to treat it. It would be nice to have a phylogeny that would naturally indicate such things.

[4] A possible extension of the tree metaphor is put forth by Frederik Cohan of Wesleyan University, who suggests adding an 'ecovar' notation (short for "ecological variant") to bacteria and viruses. As Carl Zimmer so succinctly puts it, "The bacterial strain that caused the first recorded outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Philadelphia, for example, should be called Legionella pneumophila ecovar Philadelphia."

Notes:

It may be neither here nor there, but in writing out a wishlist of the perfect phylogenic system, I came up with that it should deal with the following:
- Common descent, evolution of major function, and speciation (as the tree metaphor currently does);
- HGT (specific gene chunks that were transfered, and past lineages & other signifying metadata of those genes);
- Phenotype & function: cellular mechanics/architecture and proteomic profile (trying to classify organisms in terms of what goes on 'under the hood');
- Current ecological niche (e.g., Cohan's 'ecovar' notation).

Others' lists may differ.

How processed foods, pesticides, and pollution are bad for us (aka, the "twinkies are like smallpox blankets" hypothesis)

2009-05-01T21:30:00.005-05:00

Last summer I wrote about a potential link between high fructose corn syrup and some of the malaise of modern society. Here's a more general argument- which I suspect is significantly true- for how and why things like HFCS are likely bad for us.

I believe in the next ten years we'll increasingly learn that many of the corrosive effects of eating poorly aren't due to an overabundance of sugar, fat, or carbohydrates; they're due to the chemicals in processed foods and our environment interacting with the body's epigenetic machinery in unpredictable and unhealthy ways.

Now, it should be noted that our cells are, as a rule, marvels of self-regulation: it's downright hard to get them 'out of whack'. We see this in the amount of biological redundancy in many cellular processes, in the relative infrequency of obvious dysregulation (e.g., the chance of a cell turning cancerous), and in the layered conditionals for cell suicide should something go seriously wrong.

But in eating Western food, and living in a Western environment, we're continuously flooded with a menagerie of biologically active chemicals that evolution hasn't had a chance to foolproof our cell machinery against.[1] Biology is filled with examples of how evolution often does not protect against that which it hasn't been exposed to-- for a slightly crass illustrative analogy, consider that smallpox blankets may be to native americans what twinkies are to us. It takes time and, yes, often selection to get used to new things. Certainly, following conventional wisdom, some health problems may be caused by an imbalance in our intake of macronutrients-- too much fat or sugar, for instance-- but our ancestors didn't eat perfect diets and evolution has had some time to work on protecting us against these. The chemicals in processed foods, pesticides, and such, however, are an entirely new enemy, and known to affect epigenetics[2], a regulatory context in which hidden maladaptive changes can accumulate and affect one's phenotype.

This epigenetic dysregulation via processed foods, pesticides, and pollution I'm hypothesizing might happen directly, with these synthetic chemicals interacting with chromosomes, methyl groups, and such to push and prod gene regulation in unnatural ways, or indirectly via metagenetics (changing the constitution of our gut flora, which in turn influences our gene expression and epigenetics. Alternatively, following Michael Pollan, perhaps the absence of natural enzymes in highly processed foods could lead to these epigenetic outcomes.

How much damage did smallpox do to the Native Americans? Quite a lot. How much damage has eating Twinkies done to us? I fear the answer here will also turn out to be, Quite a lot.

At any rate, eating organic and staying away from processed foods is currently considered more of a philosophical lifestyle choice than one with definite health consequences. This very well may change over the next few years as we start to learn more about the intersection of food and epigenetics.

[1]. Most synthetic pesticides are, in fact, used because of their demonstrable ability to circumvent their targets' cellular safeguards and cause malfunctions.

[2]. Olaharski AJ, Rine J, Marshall BL, Babiarz J, Zhang L, et al. 2005 The Flavoring Agent Dihydrocoumarin Reverses Epigenetic Silencing and Inhibits Sirtuin Deacetylases. PLoS Genet 1(6): e77. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0010077

Notes:
- Unfortunately, this is a difficult hypothesis to test. The gold standard would be to compare the epigenetic configurations of identical twins raised apart, in similar demographics but eating different diets and surrounded by different pollution levels. But there are only so many identical twins available for study.

- This hypothesized connection can be taken in either direction: one, that the sea of chemicals which surrounds us in modern life has detrimental epigenetic effects; and two, that a significant amount of the physiological (and perhaps social) malaise of Western societies can be traced back to epigenetic changes induced by our chemical environment.

Edit, 5-12-09: Nicholas Wade of the NYT has a great piece on epigenetics up-- From One Genome, Many Types of Cells. But How?

Hiatus over

2009-04-29T21:45:00.001-05:00

The title says it all. Expect more posts soon.

Our National Debt: 1/200th of everything in the world

2008-06-20T15:54:00.006-05:00

According to the U.S. National Debt Clock, our government is currently 9.371 trillion dollars in debt. Just how much money this is is actually pretty interesting.

I emailed Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) for a rough estimate of how much (at current prices) it would take to purchase every economic right in the world-- i.e., how much money every sort of thing, property, and salable right in the world is worth. Now, this is back-of-the-envelope math, so there are plenty of caveats, but Levitt suggested the following as a rough estimate:
WDP (World Domestic Product) * 30.

Now, since cia.gov says the WDP as of 2006 (purchasing power parity) was estimated at $65.95 trillion, we get:
9.371/(65.95*30)=.0047

So, bottom-line? Our national debt is roughly equal to half a percent of the economic value of everything in the world. 1/200th of Every. Thing.

(Until we start to inflate it away, of course!)

Quote: 13.7 hours of education

2008-06-18T11:59:00.001-05:00

John Hawks, summarizing a recent study on the state of our science education:

We're entering an age in which health decisions will be made based on genetic information -- when everyone may know their own gene sequences if they want to. New diseases are emerging, new crops are being developed, and new organisms are being transplanted from one continent to another. Decisions about the economic development of entire regions -- perhaps entire nations -- are now subject to the evaluation of biodiversity, including threatened and endangered species.

The people making these decisions ten to twenty years from now will have an average of 13.7 hours of education on evolution.

I think positive change in our culture's approach to scientific literacy is coming. Painfully slow, but coming.

Update 6-22-08: Hawks has a nice post up arguing that evolution education matters- that evolutionary theory sheds light on how we should think about many pressing current issues.

Transcipt of Lessig's Change Congress Announcement

2008-05-23T17:35:00.004-05:00

A couple months ago I transcribed Lessig's announcement of the Change Congress movement-- since then, it's just been sitting on my hard drive. So in the spirit of spring cleaning and making good things more searchable, here's the full text of the announcement.

Lessig Launches beta of Change Congress Project in Sunshine Week Lecture
Thursday, March 20, 2008 1:30 PM Eastern
The National Press Club - Washington, DC

Introduction by Ellen Miller, Executive Director and Co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation.

Abridged Introduction: Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School, founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society, and founded the Creative Commons Foundation. Before joining Stanford he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a professor at the University of Chicago. He has clerked for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Scalia. Among many other awards and activities, Lessig has also authored 4 books.

Lessig:

So I'm going to talk about Truth, Trust, and Title VII.

First, a little about Truth. So we have a government, which engages in lots of policy making, faces questions in lots of very hard cases, gets some of those cases right, gets some of those cases wrong. But I want to focus for a moment on what we should think of as easy policy cases, easy policy cases which our government increasingly gets wrong.

For example, one that I spent ten years of my life dealing with, copyright term. There's a consensus among policymakers that if you're going to change the copyright term, it could only make sense to change the copyright term prospectively. Copyright is an incentive to produce new works; no matter what we do, George Gershwin will not produce anything more. Indeed in England, the Gowers Commission, headed by the former editor of the Financial Times, studied all of the economic literature about copyright term, and concluded that never could it make sense to extend the term of an existing copyright. Milton Friedman in the United States, when asked about the question, said anybody who thought it could was, quote, "brain-dead".

But the puzzle is that every time governments confront this question of copyright term, they always extend the term prospectively and retrospectively both. Indeed in the cycle that we're in the middle of right now, Germany extended the term first, leading the EU to extend the term, leading the United States to extend the term, leading EU to it because we went beyond the EU, leading Spain to extend it again, leading to this endless cycle of extending the term of existing copyrights.

Here's an easy policy question, which governments consistently get wrong.

Or think of a second one, nutrition. There's a consensus among scientists that we eat too much of this junk, not enough of this stuff. Indeed in 2003 the World Health Organization tried to set standards to guide the amount of sugar that we would consume: they said no more than 10% of our caloric intake from sugar. Well the sugar industry, pictured in this very sweet way here, went ballistic- there they are, going ballistic- at the suggestion that we eat only 10% of our calories from sugar. They launched an attack on the WHO's efforts, indeed leading the United States Senate, here's a letter from Senator Craig, to threaten to withhold funding from the WHO if they didn't adjust their recommendation. Indeed adjust their recommendation to 25% consumption of sugar in our daily diet. And indeed in 2003, the food nutrition board, after the sugar industry got a little bit more support on that board, increased the recommendation to 25% of our caloric intake coming from sugar. This is a, quote, "balanced diet" according to our government? Here's a daily intake that would satisfy this? You could start with some fruit loops or M&Ms for breakfast, a glass of milk, cheeseburger for lunch, pizza, indeed three slices of pepperoni pizza and cookies, for dinner. That's a balanced diet according to our government.

Here again, an easy policy case, from the perspective of those who know about this issue, which we get wrong.

Or maybe most profoundly, the issue that all of us have focused on in the last couple years, this issue of global warming. Obviously there's a consensus out there that we're doing it, we're responsible for it. As Al Gore summarized the debate, the debate's over, there are five points in this consensus. Number one, global warming is real; number two, we human beings are mainly responsible; number three, consequences of this are very bad; number four, we need to fix it quickly; and number five, it's not too late to fix it.

Now this consensus has been tested in studies in both scientific journals and in popular media. So, a review of a thousand peer-reviewed scientific journal articles published between 1993 and 2003 found that 0%- exactly zero- questioned that basic consensus. And then a similar study of six hundred popular media articles between 1988 and 2002 found that 53% questioned the basic science. This is of course the product of an extraordinary amount of junk science that had been funded to spread in this debate, leading to this extraordinary delay in the United States of at least ten years in confronting perhaps the most important public policy problem we face as a world.

Again, an easy public policy question which government got wrong.

Now in all three of these cases, these easy cases, these easy cases that we get wrong, the fundamental question is why is it. Not that in the hard cases government goes off-track, but in cases where there is no real debate, government goes off-track.

That's Truth. Think a little bit about Trust.

We have in our society many institutions that depend upon trust. Trust by the people in what they do, in order to be effective. Think about courts, or doctors, or academics. This trust depends on certain conditions that these institutions live with, then. Conditions where we believe that their decisions are a function of reason, not a function of their interests, either personal or institutional interest.

So think about the Supreme Court. Which has done an extraordinarily good job, both the Federal Supreme Court, and Federal courts generally, in building in people a sense that whatever reason they've made for their decision, it has little to do with their personal gain. Or even the gain that their institution might get from that decision. Of course we question the politics in their decision, and rightly so, but the institution has developed the conditions of trust that let us believe that its decisions are not guided by this personal consideration.

Think though, about doctors, who have actually not been so good in building this same sort of trust for the work that they do. Indeed they reveal a kind of blindness, fundamental blindness, to how their work, and the institution they've built, connects to how people view them. So for example, this drug, Alteplase. It's a drug that was developed to deal with what we used to call strokes, which the industry now wants to call 'brain attacks'. This drug was studied in a 1998 American Health Association study. That study had significant support for the release of this drug, but some pretty significant dissent about whether its safety was, on balance, supported. When a 2000 report was issued by the AHA about this, the dissent magically disappeared. Indeed the author of the dissent was stricken from the list of those who had actually worked on the report. And then it was discovered that the company that was funding the drug, Genentech, had given more than eleven million dollars to the American Health Association, raising fundamental questions about exactly what led to the conclusions of the report, leading this L.A. Times reporter to comment, "This recommendation may have been made in a true spirit of unbiased scientific inquiry, but the appearance of dispassionate analysis was eroded by large donations from a drug company."

Or think for example about this issue of vaccines. Of course one has to be extremely careful not to mark oneself off as a nutcase in this debate, so here I'm going to be very careful. First, vaccines are good and right and needed, no doubt. And number two, mercury does not cause autism. I want to make this very clear- vaccines are good, mercury does not cause autism. Alright, that's not what I'm asserting here. What I'm asking you to do though, is to put yourself in the place of parents, parents of children with autism. Who for years have suffered this anxiety that maybe something they did, some decision they made about how in fact they went about raising their child and taking precautions against disease, this extraordinary anxiety, might have led to this link between the disease that their children face and the steps they took. And recognize in the parents here, the pervasive lack of trust they have in the information given to them about this question.

And why is there this pervasive lack of trust? Well as the House Oversight Committee commented in 2000, "The FDA standards defining conflicts of interest are ridiculously broad." The CDC has virtually no standards, because all ACIP (this is the immunization board) members automatically receive annual waivers. The very members of the board receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the industry which they are purportedly regulating.

Now when you raise these questions with doctors, they say in great outrage, 'Of course, we would never compromise our scientific judgment for money.' Even though, scientific studies of the effect of reviewers who have been paid, compared to reviewers who have not been paid, consistently demonstrate that there is in fact a bias that comes in the interpretation of data that comes from reviewers who have been paid. But even if you accept their claim, that they would never compromise their scientific judgment, this claim is simply oblivious to the way in which the institution needs to build trust. It's a hollow claim in the face of the background knowledge that money so completely pervades the process of producing knowledge here.

Or think finally about academics. And the increasing rise of what's called the 'coin operated expert'. My colleagues, increasingly, who come to Washington paid by industry to opine about matters of public policy. Saying the way the world ought to be based on their academic expertise. Increasingly, there's a presumption that if you're here, talking about public policy, it is because you've been paid- why else would you have come? And indeed, so deep is this presumption, that whenever one encounters a policymaker like a congressman or a senator about the issue, confronted in response with the assumption that you have taken money.

So in a pretty heated email exchange I had with Senator Sununu, once he shot back to me, "And don't shill for the big guys protecting marketshare through neutrality regulation either." And it hit me, like a ton of bricks. He thought, he assumed, that I was being paid, by Google, or et. al, for the stuff that I wanted to talk about here. He assumed it, because again, why else would one be here. And of course, his assumption is reasonable against a background of academics who choose not to stand and say what right public policy is based on their experience or knowledge- instead, to say, because they've been paid.

This is a pervasive lack of trust, I suggest, in key institutions, because we ignore how trust is built. And my claim here is not some sort of simple claim against money, or the importance of money. Money has an extremely important part in our society, to drive the market in ways the market needs to be driven. We just need to recognize that money in certain places is destructive of trust. And to recognize that even if we don't believe that the people making decisions are themselves directly driven by the money. Because trust comes not from what they do, but instead from how what they do is perceived.

Finally, about Title VII.

Not the Title VII you were thinking about. I'm going to talk about Title VII of the Communications Act. Then you're going to tell me there isn't Title VII of the Communications Act, there's only Titles I, II, III, IV, V, VI, that's true. But the Title VII that I want to talk about is something that was intended to come out of Title II, which covers common carriers, or telecom in this context, and Title VI, which covers cable.

Al Gore, in 1994, proposed this idea of creating Title VII out of Title II and Title VI, and to have it regulate all internet services. So all of these internet services would be under one organizational structure, and that structure would be de-regulated. Minimal interconnect requirements, not even the Net Neutrality issue people are talking about today, just minimal regulation to encourage investment in this space.

When Gore's team took this idea to the Hill, he got back the answer as one of the members of the team told me- "Hell no", the hill said. Why? "How are we going to raise money from the telecoms if we de-regulate them?" was the question.

That's Title VII.

Alright. Take these things together: Trust, Truth, Title VII. Let me apply the thought to Congress.

First, this idea of Trust and Truth. The framers of our constitution were fundamentally focused on what they would have called 'independence'. We think independence means independence from Britain- I'm not talking about independence from Britain, and neither were they. They were thinking of independence in the sense of building a government that didn't have dependence, meaning the members of that government were not improperly dependent upon outside influences, particularly the influence of money. As Jefferson put it, "Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambitions." Or as Foner[?] describes the 18th century, "It was an axiom of 18th century politics that dependents lacked a will of their own, and thus did not deserve a role in public affairs."

Did not deserve a role in public affairs.

Now the point here is improper dependence, because of course we want our representatives to be dependent upon the will of the people expressed in the polls. But it's dependence upon the influence of money that led to the kind of corruption that was their obsessive focus in the founding generation. Their common aim was to build institutions, constitutions, against that dependism.

Now their idealism failed in the original period of the republic. Indeed here's a picture of Daniel Webster, a particularly evil picture because that's my point. Daniel Webster, during the time in which he was serving in Congress, was a paid representative of the Bank of the United States, and wrote the Bank of the United States, "If it be wished that my relation to the bank be continued, it might be well to send me the usual retainers."

Directly in the interest, in the dependence upon that bank, while pushing public policy as a member of Congress. Indeed it wasn't until 1853 that bribery was even a crime, as it applies to Congress.

So my point is that they had less than ideal results from their ideal of creating independence, and in the sense that I'm criticizing them, 200 years later we have radically improved on what they did. This crude form of corruption, 'feathering the nest' of the representative, is not the problem we face today. This is the exception, Duke Cunningham, not the rule. Personal corruption in this Congress is in my view at its lowest in history in the United States, lower than it's ever been.

But the point to recognize is that just because there's no personal corruption, does not mean that this institution is independent, or that its members are independent. It doesn't mean that there is no institutional corruption, in the sense that the institution is driven by interests that ought not to be driving it. They can be personally secure from the influences that Daniel Webster couldn't resist, but they can be professionally dependent, subject to a kind of corruption, which we need to increasingly see.

The 'economy of influence', which defines the way ideas and action moves through this Congress, is exactly the kind of corruption, lack of independence, that the framers feared. This economy of influence, which controls access, and which affects the results, and affects the respect, that the institution has.

So, has it affected the respect of Congress? Well, Trust is an easy question to answer. Respect for this Congress is the lowest that it's ever been. 19% approval rating for this institution. And with respect to Truth, well think back to my example of the easy cases. Right, who cares about Mickey Mouse, right? I'll just drop that issue. Whether he's in the public domain or not is not the most important issue out there. But when our children are facing the extraordinary problem of obesity, the 25% recommendation for sugar intake is a serious problem. And when we take the most serious public policy problem that we face as a nation, and delay considering it for at least 10 years? This is a profoundly serious problem, a mistake of profound importance.

All of these errors here are driven by this improper influence of money. All of them are a function of an improper dependence. This Constitution, that the framers imagined they would build against that dependence, has failed. These people are personally honest, I will believe and assert, they're institutionally corrupt.

And this is the most important challenge, I believe, that we face. To build this Constitution of independence, that they failed to build.

Of course there's an extraordinary movement to do that already, a movement of reform, a reform that expresses itself in the single meme of this election, the meme of change.

But the reform I want to talk about is the change in the power of money, in the way that public policy gets made. A change in how Congress works: that's the meme I want to animate this Change Congress movement. And I think we need to recognize an extraordinary opportunity for this change right now, in this election. There are 68 open seats in this election, the largest number of open seats since at least 1996. And these open seats will bring members of Congress into Congress who will have a taste for reform, as they begin to taste their life under the existing system, a life which is increasingly dominated by cubbyhole telemarketing to fundraising to guarantee they can return to Congress.

So the Truth and Trust, which we need to focus on in thinking about this reform, truth in getting the right answer, and getting the right answer for the right reason, has led many reformers to talk about proposals that might restore both the trust of this institution, and the ability of this institution to get it right.

So for example there's been a call by, Democrats primarily, John Edwards launched the call, that members not accept money from lobbyists or PACs, an effort driven to drive an increase in trust, in the ability for people to understand what members of Congress are doing not as a function of who gave them money, but what they think is right. And there's been a push for transparency, muted by both parties, pushed mainly by organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation, which aims for the same objective, increasing trust.

And a very strong push right now, the Republicans taking the lead on this against earmarks, for the same reasons, so we can begin to believe the reason that money is being allocated doesn't have to do with the money going into a campaign, decisions being made for the right reasons. And not just because we're worried about, quote, "waste", but because we're worried about government functioning in the basic way it's supposed to function.

So for example, this guy, Douglas Hashek[?], was an entrepreneur developing a fire-retardant T-shirt for the Army, so that soldiers in Iraq would have a T-shirt that would resist burning when they were in the middle of firestorms. He then discovered as he went to bid on this government contract, that the bid had been closed down, because of an earmark from David Wu, a Democrat from Oregon, giving the contract to this company. But it turned out that this company actually hadn't produced a fire-retardant T-shirt; the T-shirt melted at a certain temperature on the skin of the Iraqi soldier's backs. And then it turned out that that company had given $9,000 to Congressman Wu in campaign contributions, through the collection of money from inside the company.

This is not just a question of whether we waste money. It's a question of whether government can function the way it's supposed to function. Both Truth and Trust, threatened by this process of earmarking.

And finally in the context of public financing. It's been pushed by members of both parties, maybe more by the Democrats, to remove this dependency directly. Consider the proposal of Paul Begala and James Carville, that says once a member is elected to Congress, he's not permitted from that moment on to raise one dollar for his re-election. Instead the amount of money he gets is a function of how much his opponent raises. So his opponent raises a million bucks, he gets $800,000, written to him in a check from the U.S. Treasury. A design to assure that from the very moment he enters Congress his work is not driven by an understanding of whether he's going to get rewarded in the campaign fundraising process. The same idea behind public campaigns work, adjusted[?] dollars work, to get public financing to allow members to focus on what they ought to be focusing on, instead of focusing on what will get them money in their re-election.

Now of course the Right has been naturally skeptical about these proposals. The Right worries this is more Big Government, more spending by government, we should be focusing on reducing the size of government. But what the Right needs to recognize, is my message behind my story about Title VII.

Why is government so big? Members of the Right? Because Congressmen must get elected. The insidious relationship between the desire to regulate, so that money can be raised for an election, drives the expansion in the size of government. And if we could remove that dependency we could allow the government to shrink in those places where it maybe ought to shrink. A huge chunk of the FCC could disappear, if it weren't for this weird and perverse interaction.

So if Public Campaign is right that these elections would cost maybe $2 billion dollars to run, we need to recognize, those from the Right, that $2 billion dollars is a tiny number (see, really tiny on the screen, now), compared to the drag that this unnecessary regulation imposes on the economy.

So this has led some of us, in particular me and Joe Trippi, who I'm honored is here today, to think about launching what we call this Change Congress movement, and today we're launching the beta of this Change Congress movement.

The Change Congress movement is a bipartisan movement, maybe a multi-partisan movement. It's not just about Dems and Republicans. Designed to leverage and amplify the reform work that has been done by others. It's a kind of Google mashup applied to politics, where we take the work that's going on out there already and we find ways to make it more significant. Not displacing the extraordinarily important work done by these reform organizations, but finding ways to make it more successful.

So there's a simple sense of the mashup, you go to our page right now you can see in the front page this map, which in this sludge color tries to measure the amount of money that comes to a campaign from PAC and lobbyist contributions, so you can click on your campaign or your candidate and discover how much of his money comes from PAC or lobbyist contributions.

But it's a mashup in a more fundamental sense than that, and it will be rolled out in three stages.

Layer 1 that we are rolling out today, gives people a simple way to pledge support for reform. It's modeled after the work that we've done at Creative Commons.

Creative Commons' objective was to find a simple way for copyright holders, authors, to mark their creative work with the freedoms they intended it to carry. So you go to our page and you pick, do you want to allow commercial use, do you want to allow modifications, do you require others license the work that is the modification of yours just as freely? You get a license, the license appears on the webpage attached to the content, if you click on the license you have a simple description of the freedoms associated with the content, backed up with an enforceable copyright license.

Change Congress wants to do the same thing for reform. So a simple way, for both candidates and citizens, to signal their support for reform. And the reform, that we'll be talking about, comes in four separate possible pledges.

Number one, that you won't take money from lobbyists or PACs.

Number two, that you support a permanent ban for earmarks.

Number three, that you support the public financing of public elections, and

Number four, that you support changes in rules and law to require total transparency in the way Congress functions.

The candidate has the option to make this pledge by going to the webpage and picking which of these things they will support, they then get this badge, or one of the badges want, they get code they can put onto their page, when you see this on a webpage and click to it you get a description precisely of the support that that candidate gives for the reform they want to make.

So too with the citizen. The citizen can get a pledge in the same way they can put on their website that indicates what kind of candidates they will support, signaling the level of support that exists out in a particular district for certain kinds of reform.

That's Layer 1. Really in some sense the smallest step we can make to make more transparent the kind of support there is for this reform.

Step two is to track support for reform. Because we recognize already out there, there have been efforts to get pledges to components of the Change Congress platform. And indeed there are hundreds of members who have pledge to support various parts of it, including Public Campaign's effort to get people to support in 2006 a pledge for public financing.

So in stage two of the Change Congress site we're going to develop some wikified tools, inspired by the work of Sunlight in exactly this way, to build an army of collaborators whose job it will be to suss out which reforms certain candidates are for. And then once we verify this reform, and make sure this is the reform this candidate has supported, or this member has supported, we will ask the member to join the Change Congress movement with respect to that reform.

But then we will map, both actual support and pledged support of existing members of Congress. Actual supporters will either be marked red, dark red, or dark blue, for Republicans or Dems who have actually pledged, but tracked support will be light red and light blue, for members who have actually signaled that they support platforms in this. And then those who have neither taken the pledge nor signaled their support will still remain this ugly color, sludge, so that you begin to get a map that signals exactly how broad actual measure of support out there is for this fundamental Congressional reform. Revealing, what we think, is an extraordinarily optimistic picture, just how deep and strong support is for substantial change in the way Congress functions.

Finally Layer 3, we'll begin to fund this reform, kind of a carrot in the mix, following the ideals of the Emily's List. We will set up a reform page where people can pledge money to candidates who have supported reform, pledge five dollars a month to five candidates who have supported reform, to fund and support these campaigns for reform.

Now all three of these layers are intended to build recognition. In the best of what you could think of as a web way, because this is actually a Silicon Valley approach to this problem, not building big institutions but leveraging off other institutions. And in many ways it's a Wikipedia-inspired solution to the problem. Wikipedia's great insight, and of course many have followed the same model, and Sunlight does this right now, is to take the problem of reform and break it down into manageable, digestible, and segmentable problems. That people can work on 20 minutes a day, or 20 minutes a week, that gives them a sense of actually accomplishing something towards the end they're trying to accomplish, a public good they want to support, but that actually produces value towards that end. And these tools, embedded in this site, will be the most important part of how this site advances the movement.

Again, complementing, not competing, with the extraordinary work done by others. Not announcing some new idea, but really recognizing a new opportunity that this idea has to have some effect in changing the way Congress functions.

These are the first steps that we're announcing today.

The next steps will be to build the Board of this organization in a bipartisan way that makes it sound credible, much more credible than any flailing idea of a law professor, even a law professor backed up by someone as credible as Joe Trippi. But these steps, these next steps, will be to build this movement into something that can leverage the support we believe is out there to effect this fundamental change in the way Congress works.

Let me just add one final thought.

So in 1965 this man gave a radio address. In the radio address he said this:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury." "From that moment on," Reagan said, "the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the treasury - with the result that democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy."

I think Reagan had it half-right. There is something fundamentally unstable about democracy. About the democracy that we've inherited.

But the danger here does not come from the masses. The problem we face right now is not that the masses have gotten together to steal, to rape, from the rich, all the money of society. The problem we face is in fact the reverse. It's the problem of crony capitalism, using power to capture government. Not wealth pumped down, but the reverse, wealth pumped up, a problem of the top 1% in our society taking advantage of this structure to the disadvantage of the bottom 99%.

This is profoundly destructive, of trust and democracy. This is the danger that Reagan should have recognized. And the challenge is whether we can in fact change this.

Now the "experts," political experts, will tell you, can't be done. It's not possible to focus people on this issue, it's not a concern of ordinary people, process always loses over substance. There are going to be many more important problems that the public faces, and that's what will get their attention.

And that might be a true description of how politics works today. And the challenge is whether we can change that, to get them focused on something more than the particular problems they now face.

But we shouldn't forget that there have been extraordinarily important moments in the history of America where process revolutions have succeeded. And more importantly, we need to point to what I think is a common recognition of a certain kind of problem.

So every one of you in this room knows an alcoholic or someone who has been hurt by alcoholism. I know it personally, very very significantly, in my own family.

What is the structure of the problem of an alcoholic? An alcoholic could be losing his family, his job, his liver, these are extraordinarily important problems in any scheme of reckoning, these are the most important problems he could be facing. But he will never face and solve those problems until he solves this alcoholism first.

This problem that I have described is not the most important problem. It's just the first problem. It's the first problem that we have to solve if we're going to solve other problems. There are no end to extraordinarily difficult problems that we face right now in this country.

But we won't be able to address those problems sensibly until we solve this first problem, this dependence on money. Not a dependence that reveals itself in the way evil people act, but a dependence that corrupts even the way good people solve the problems they come to Washington to address. We need to solve this problem now. We need to take this extraordinarily important and powerful passion for change and direct it at the one institution that really needs to change if this problem is to be solved.

Thanks very much.

Quote: FSJ on Google

2008-05-16T11:47:00.003-05:00

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, on working at Google:

And you know what? There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world's smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently. Really.

I think it's a complicated situation, but I have to admit he has a point.

A suggested model for Dark Energy

2008-05-16T11:13:00.010-05:00

I decided to post a brainstorm on an unsolved problem in theoretical physics just to get it out there. This is probably not particularly interesting to most of my readers- pardon the detour. Back to your regularly scheduled content shortly.

------------------------ Start Brainstorm ------------------------
An analogical approach to explaining Dark Energy, with a suggested formalization:

Dark Energy, or the mystery force causing the accelerated expansion of the universe, is one of the prime mysteries of modern physics. The approach I suggest here, which I believe to be novel, is essentially to model spacetime as imperfectly compressible (contrary to the common implicit assumption of perfect compressibility) and identify Dark Energy as the natural, emergent 'pushback' connected with gravity's compression of spacetime.

For example, if we take spacetime to be like a balloon, the gravitational effects from aggregated clumps of matter (stars, galaxies, black holes, etc) are like fingers pushing into the balloon. It's natural for the balloon to bulge where it's not being compressed.

If spacetime is perfectly incompressible wrt gravity, we could expect a special-case universe composed of 0% energy, 100% homogeneously distributed matter to neither contract nor expand (contrary to the current prediction of contraction due to gravity), much like how a balloon filled with incompressible gas pushed equally from all sides would stay in equilibrium. Once matter starts to 'clump up', however (and it invariably would due to quantum effects), the universe would start to expand. I haven't run the numbers, but it would appear such expansion might become an accelerating positive-feedback cycle.

The timeline of massive expansions due to Dark Energy seems to correlate with what we can guess about major thresholds in the de-homogenization of matter distribution. We would expect a massive initial de-homogenization right after the Big Bang due to quantum effects, then another when particles are able to form, another when large-scale matter structures are able to form, and another as matter organizes into very large scale structures such as galaxies, clusters, and superclusters.

I would formalize this as follows: within any specific range of times, Dark Energy should be equal to:

Gr(a)*S(a) - Gr(h)*S(h)

Where
Gr(a) is the actual number of gravitons exchanged in the universe;

Gr(h) is the hypothetical number of gravitons which would be exchanged in a universe of the current size if matter and energy were distributed homogeneously (necessarily equal to or lesser than Gr(a));

S(a) is the scaling factor of how much the average graviton bends spacetime in the current universe;

S(h) is the scaling factor of how much the average graviton would bend spacetime in a hypothetical universe of the current size but where matter and energy were homogeneously distributed-- presumably differing from S(a) due to differences in average graviton longevity.

(An alternate geometrical formalization might involve trying to quantify Dark Energy as a buoyant effect on spacetime equal to the total amount of spacetime 'displaced' by the gravitational imprint of matter+dark matter+energy.)

Obviously this formalization needs a lot more work on a number of fronts. Specifically, we don't know enough about the mechanics of gravitons to speak with much confidence on the difference between S(a) and S(h), and it's unclear how this force would make itself felt (a new carrier particle? A non-localizable property of spacetime? A MOND-like modification of gravity? If it's a carrier particle might there be a lag effect?). I'll admit it's rough. But I think the core approach is relatively clear.
------------------------ End Brainstorm ------------------------

Quote: Blog comments

2008-04-22T11:21:00.004-05:00

Lawrence Lessig has been getting some trolls over at his blog and asked his readers for advice on a comment policy (basically, what the threshold should be for deleting inappropriate comments). Here's what I took to be the most insightful suggestion:

Anon:

You should delete all comments, including those which attack you and your work, which are expressed in a fashion which a civil adult would not use when speaking face-to-face with another adult. Off-topic comments also get launched. That is, being on-topic is necessary but not sufficient for a comment to remain. Being civil is also necessary but not sufficient for a comment to remain.

Larry, there's an adage which applies to hiring, that says: A-quality people hire A-quality people. B-quality people hire C-quality people. So you need to only make A hires, or your business is headed downhill.

In commenting, I've observed that A-quality comments attract A-quality comments. B-quality comments attract C-quality comments.

I'm an *old hand* at the internet discussion forum game, though I don't care to list my name here. Your blog is already headed downhill as far as comments are concerned. If you want to maintain comment quality, you must prune rather ruthlessly. Now, nothing terrible will happen if you don't. Your comment section won't be any good, but then most comment sections aren't, so yours won't stand out. I don't know that you actually want the hassle of maintaining a good comment section, it's certainly harder than maintaining a bad one. But I'm telling you how, if you want to: if you want to maintain an actual GOOD comment section, one that literally *attracts* A-level commenters, you need to prune ruthlessly.

I suspect the same notion holds true for most internet communities, wikis inclusive, once they reach a certain popularity threshold.

(Luckily, Modern Dragons does not yet suffer from such pitfalls of runaway popularity!)

John Wheeler

2008-04-20T17:51:00.002-05:00

John A. Wheeler, the great physicist who coined the term 'black hole,' a primary architect of modern physics, and the scientist for whom the fictional "Wheeler Laboratory is named in 'A Beautiful Mind', died last week. Many are calling this an end of an era; as Max Tegmark of MIT says, "For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing." There's a great write-up in the Times about his life and career.

I'm no authority on this stuff, but as an enthusiast reading about the history of physics, I was always impressed with Wheeler's propensity toward clever speculation. Here's an excerpt from Richard Feynman's 1965 Nobel Lecture where he talks about one of his mentor's crazy ideas- the idea remains unproven, but it provided the inspiration for modern Quantum Electrodynamics:

As a by-product of this same view, I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" And, then he explained on the telephone, "suppose that the world lines which we were ordinarily considering before in time and space - instead of only going up in time were a tremendous knot, and then, when we cut through the knot, by the plane corresponding to a fixed time, we would see many, many world lines and that would represent many electrons, except for one thing. If in one section this is an ordinary electron world line, in the section in which it reversed itself and is coming back from the future we have the wrong sign to the proper time - to the proper four velocities - and that's equivalent to changing the sign of the charge, and, therefore, that part of a path would act like a positron." "But, Professor", I said, "there aren't as many positrons as electrons." "Well, maybe they are hidden in the protons or something", he said. I did not take the idea that all the electrons were the same one from him as seriously as I took the observation that positrons could simply be represented as electrons going from the future to the past in a back section of their world lines. That, I stole!

And thus the Feynman Electron Diagram was born.

Still, I have to think it'd be a neat application of Occam's Razor if Wheeler is eventually proven right that the fabric of reality is woven by just one particle, getting knocked forward and backward in time by its past and future selves.

The dark and murky effects of HFCS

2008-04-12T03:00:00.026-05:00

I like America a lot. But lately I've been wondering, "what's going on here?"

The latest poll numbers are in, and I'm clearly not alone. The AP is now reporting that 81% of Americans think we're on the wrong track. One need not look far for proximate reasons: a strange and fragile economy, huge credit card debts, the behavior of our elected officials, our election of said officials, the sad, hollow state of our public discourse, voter apathy, the general state of our media, and so forth. There are still plenty of things going right in America, but compared to our particularly exemplary history of competence, principles, and vibrant public life, something has clearly changed.

As Bob Herbert of the Times opines in today's column, Losing Our Will,

This is the pathetic state of affairs in the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Whatever happened to the dynamic country that flexed its muscles after World War II and gave us the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations (in a quest for peace, not war), the interstate highway system, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the finest higher education system the world has known, and a standard of living that was the envy of all?

This dysfunction is clearly a matter of willpower, not capacity. So what's happening and what can we do about it?

Many (such as Herbert) simply blame President Bush. He's certainly made a dog's breakfast out of anything he's touched, but I tend to see him as more of a latecoming figurehead to this national dysfunction that's been building for quite some time.

Many would say this is a question without an answer: that when you talk about a culture getting screwed up, the dysfunction is so complex and emergent that it defies words. Similarly, a group of researchers have recently asserted that "once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile" and devotes more and more of its output to merely supporting its complexity, and as time goes on will tend to either implode or crumble in result to outside threats (they describe Rome's downfall as such[1]). I think this is worth noting, but the 'it just happens' explanation rings rather hollow and unsatisfying.

Many blame the media; secular atheists; religious fundamentalists; monied interests; particular cultural quirks of the baby boomers; the winner's curse; various academic fads and corrosive memes; various liberal movements; various conservative movements; corporations; Canadians. There's likely some truth in some of these, but our culture has dealt with worse in the past and not become dysfunctional.

Near to my heart, we have the Change Congress movement and its description of Washington as having developed an economy of influence systematically biased toward monied interests. I think this is accurate, that it contributes to the problem I describe, and that CC has some elegant solutions.

But I would suggest there's an embarrassingly simple yet profoundly corrosive factor underlying a non-trivial amount of America's dysfunction: we eat too much high-fructose corn syrup.

This connection is obscure but important. To back up a bit:

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has become the sweetener of choice for processed foods and sweetened drinks. It's cheap, sweet, and flexible (i.e., easily chemically modified for more or less sweetness and has a longer shelf-life than sugar). In the past 40 years America has had the unmatched distinction of going from eating 0 to ~70lbs of the stuff per capita annually. Lately it's appearing this has been a big mistake: the majority of the science coming in is implicating HFCS in the drastic jumps in obesity and type II diabetes of the past 40 years[2]. A common theory (though not the only one available) suggests that because HFCS can't be broken down in the way other sugars are, it taxes these alternate pathways, puts stress on the body's ability to pump out insulin, and most importantly and verifiably, tends to cause insulin resistance and general problems in regulating glucose levels[3][4]. It's likely that this looms larger for younger people with still-developing physiologies, and like many health risks, the effects of HFCS are statistical and are often felt more at the aggregate level than the personal.

This is probably old news to many readers.

What I think is not obvious and is worth pointing out is how tightly coupled glucose and cognition are, and specifically, how tightly coupled glucose regulation and willpower/self-control are.

We know that glucose is the fuel of thought: our brains use up the glucose in our bloodstream as it functions. But recent results from Gailliot and Baumeister[5] highlight several things about the brain's 'glucose economy'- among them are:

Thinking through complex problems, keeping focused, and resisting temptation consume a relatively large amount of brain glucose. Subconscious, 'easy', and habitual actions consume a relatively small amount.

We are less able to resist temptation when we have recently resisted temptation (e.g., faced with multiple temptations, our brain runs low on glucose and has a harder time going against the grain). All tasks involving self-control seem to follow the same pattern and draw from the same reservoir, be they resisting temptation, suppressing emotion, keeping focused, and so on.

Once depleted, drinking Kool-aid sweetened with sugar replenishes this reservoir of willpower, bringing experimental metrics of self-control up to their original levels, while drinking Kool-aid sweetened with Splenda (a sweetener that does not contain or metabolize into glucose) does not[6].

People vary significantly in their glucose tolerance (a measure of how accurately and quickly their bodies can normalize blood sugar), and scoring low on this test is highly predictive of tendencies toward impulsive and aggressive behavior, attention deficits, moodiness, addiction, and a general lack of self-control. In effect, their bodies' clumsiness at regulating blood glucose levels lead to having smaller reservoirs of willpower.

More commentary (with pretty graphs) at Cognitive Daily. It's a neat experiment and a fascinating finding.

In essence, willpower is a finite quantity and it's centrally (though not exclusively) linked to the presence of and ability to regulate glucose.

So on one hand, it's established that HFCS tends to corrode our bodies' ability to regulate our glucose levels. On the other, it's becoming clear that the single most important factor in willpower is having a well-functioning glucose regulation system. It's a minimal jump to put these hands together and assert that by consuming high-fructose corn syrup, we're not just making ourselves fat and diabetic, but we're also actively corroding our physiological basis for willpower and self-control.

I'm not saying this is the root cause of everything that's wrong in America, but I am saying that, aggregated over 300 million people, it'd be odd if it hasn't been a contributing factor to this weirdly lazy, short-sighted, apathetic, debt-ridden state parts of the country are in. Speaking from both a humanistic and a cost-benefit perspective, I think it makes a truly excruciating amount of sense to prioritize more direct study of this hypothesized connection, to stop subsidizing HFCS through corn subsidies, and to figure out how to prevent such situations from happening in the future.

Footnotes:

[1] Another theory on Rome's downfall is that the common and semi-indiscriminate usage of lead for plumbing, utensils, medicine, cooking ingredients, and so on caused mild brain damage to enough youngsters that Rome could no longer support itself.

[2] Bray, George A; Samara Joy Nielsen and Barry M Popkin (April 2004). "Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity." American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 79(4):537-543.

[3] Faeh, David; Kaori Minehira, Jean-Marc Schwarz, Raj Periasamy, Seongsoo Park and Luc Tappy (July 2005). "Effect of fructose overfeeding and fish oil administration on hepatic de novo lipogenesis and insulin sensitivity in healthy men." Diabetes. 54(7):1907-13.

[4] Elliott, Sharon S; Nancy L Keim, Judith S Stern, Karen Teff and Peter J Havel (November 2002). "Fructose, weight gain, and the insulin resistance syndrome." American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 76(5):911-922.

[5] Gailliot, M.T., Baumeister, R.F. (2007). The Physiology of Willpower: Linking Blood Glucose to Self-Control. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11(4), 303-327. DOI: 10.1177/1088868307303030

(If you like science, go read it-- it's genuinely interesting. http://psr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/11/4/303 )

[6] Though this particular experiment shows a link between glucose intake and willpower, the bigger picture is that it's more precisely a link between the body's ability to regulate the amount of glucose in the brain and willpower. Presumably too much sugar would disrupt this regulation just as much as too little. As the authors state,

This does not entail a linear relationship between glucose and self-control, such that a person who downs a large bag of candy will become a paragon of self-discipline for the next few hours.

Indeed.

Notes:

It's unclear how much of HFCS's reported contribution to insulin resistance is specific to HFCS and to fructose, and how much of it is a result of overingestion of sugar in general. Still, one of the criticisms of HFCS is that, because it doesn't trip the body's normal satiation response, people tend to eat or drink more of something if it's sweetened with HFCS vs. a more conventional sweetener. Fructose also has a unique metabolic footprint in that it's broken down by the liver, not absorbed through the intestine. And it's also possible that some of HFCS's observed health risks are associated less with its fructose content and more with the biochemistry of how it's commonly manufactured. The correlation between ingesting HFCS and developing a malfunction in regulating blood glucose is getting clearer and clearer, but the causal mechanism is still guesswork.

If I had to identify a smoking gun, however, it would be the unbalancing influence a high-HFCS diet likely has on the ecology of our gut flora, which is in turn tightly linked to our health. There's every reason from microbiology to believe high vs. low fructose diets would lead to different gut ecologies, and that even modest differences in gut flora could have huge physiological effects, but like most phenomena involving gut flora the science is still out.

Update, 3/08/09: Of note, the journal Environmental Health has published an (industry-disputed) study on the prevelence of mercury in high-fructose corn syrup. The takeaway seems to be twofold: one, that a significant amount of HFCS may contain mercury due to particulars in the manufacturing process. And two, that HFCS is not 'pure' by any means: it takes a cocktail of reagents, enzymes, and chemicals to refine corn syrup into HFCS, and at least some of this cocktail is carried over into the final product.
Washington Post synopsis.

New York: 2108

2008-04-09T12:09:00.007-05:00

The New York Times recently published a set of speculations on what the lives of New Yorkers will be like in the year 2108. Among those asked were professors and Nobel Laureates, and discussion topics ranged from biotechnology to global warming. All very interesting, but here's my favorite:

KATE KAPLAN
Seventh grader, School of the Future, a New York City public school near Gramercy Park
The city will be all skyscrapers, no more town houses and brownstones. Buildings will connect to each other through an aboveground tunnel system. You’ll no longer have to worry about finding a bathroom; you’ll just carry a small chip with you that can expand into a private portable toilet.
Central Park will be preserved in a bubble to protect it from the adverse effects of global warming. Everything will be shiny and nice and big. The subway cars and stations will have TVs in them. The Empire State Building will no longer be New York’s largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks. Madame Tussaud’s wax figures will have robotic capabilities.
Finally, instead of antidepressants, doctors will make people happy by implanting chips in their heads with comedy routines and programs, like my favorite, "The Colbert Report."

Well played, Miss Kaplan.

Transhumanism essay: part two

2008-04-02T11:34:00.001-05:00

Part 1: The Transhumanism Movement.
Part 2: Society is more delicate than transhumanists think.

This short essay doesn't delve into my personal ethics as applied to enhancement-- which, I must admit, I don't have figured out yet. And I'm assuming, for the sake of this essay, that a technological 'Singularity' is a feasible outcome of our current technological trajectory, or at least that significant augmentative technologies will become available in the not-too-distant future. This is a purely practical critique of full-speed-head-and-damn-the-torpedoes Transhumanism.

Transhumanism is about using technology to transcend one's humanity and becoming qualitatively more[1] than what one was born. There are, of course, social downsides to allowing people to do this.

The Equality Objection to Transhumanism: breaking the bonds of common humanity is a serious thing.  

First, let's talk about equality. In the Western public sphere, we tend to treat everyone (save children and mental patients) as exactly identical. Now, the sharp-eyed among you will notice this often doesn't make a lot of sense-- but the current excesses and irrationality involved in treating everyone as exactly identical in the public sphere are much less harmful than the excesses and necessary oversimplifications involved in treating everyone differently with respect to the the perceived value of their capabilities and potentials. More than just as a matter of efficiency or polite fiction, there’s real, generative value in the philosophy of equality, even if it doesn't completely fit reality at the seams[2]. And I think this broad-sense every-human-is-equal liberalism we’ve built into our culture is really the only buffer we have against really nasty, heartless states of affairs that could arise from the misuse of cognitive enhancement. But I suspect that the very presence of cognitive enhancement may very well erode its own mitigating buffer.

If we look inward, it’s not a large stretch to say we’re a culture worth saving and amplifying in large part because of the liberalism and philosophy of equal worth we’ve deliberately nurtured and woven into our collective self-identity. Insofar as cognitive enhancement increases the cognitive divides within society[3], people will notice and it’ll put an unavoidable culture-wide strain on this philosophical outlook. We’ve spent hundreds- perhaps thousands- of years building, affirming, and lauding our bonds of common humanity and equality, and it’s now Western society’s nominal organizing principle and the glue that holds us together. Technology that threatens to rip this integral part of our social fabric apart is not progress. Or if it is, it must pay (preferably in advance) for the damage it will cause.

Transhumanists see themselves as the “good guys” (and gals… though mostly guys). Given all the good things these technologies can do, I understand why. But I’m not quite ready to grant unconditional “good guy” status as I think there are several stands of naivety that often surface in transhumanist culture, and true 'good guys' can't be naive. In this context, I think transhumanists need to acknowledge 1. the value of our carefully and painstakingly created framework of equality, 2. that transhumanism does indeed violate it, and 3. that this violation of our current social contract is an extremely serious, dangerous thing. And it’s asking a lot, but if transhumanists are going to be at the forefront of dismantling the basis for this social philosophy, I'd prefer that they offer an alternative that people can buy into that has a more nuanced understanding of human identity and human worth in this upcoming age of increasing divides. Ideally something that provides on average as much social cohesion, philosophical coherence, and spiritual nourishment as this philosophy of equality.[4] Because if we mortgage the social bonds of the present in service of the future, that future is likely to fall apart.

I think transhumanists (and people in general) tend to think of society as a somewhat dysfunctional but intrinsically resilient entity. That, for all its warts, modern society has a solid foundation we can depend on while bootstrapping ourselves into a better mode of existence. But I think when transhumanists start to tinker with human nature, we can no longer take this for granted. After all, if you’re undermining society’s organizing principle, even with the best intentions you may break important things and deeply anger many, many people. And can you blame them? For all you’re offering, you’re also dismantling the basis for their belief and identity systems, and at least apparently pushing a system that runs counter to many of our crusading social heroes such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

I understand the promise of transhumanism: literally, to eliminate all suffering. This is not to be minimized. But I think it’s an open question whether moving to a transhuman society will break society in the process.

Of course, it's unfair to put all of this on the shoulders of transhumanism. The debate of whether we should allow these technologies into society is a probably hollow one: they have so many physical and philosophical beachheads already, and we are such an open, self-directed society that lives and breathes the ideas of potential and progress, that of course they’ll become part of society. Similarly transhumanism, in its better and more public corners, is a movement that very sincerely means well, and it's less causing the development of these transformative technologies so much as being a cheerleader for their positive uses. And asking the more realistic question of, given that this will happen, how do we make this happen in the best possible way?

But my advice to transhumanists is, do understand that society is a much more fragile thing than you probably realize, and that large parts of society may not greet you as saviors.

[1] Arguable, of course. Francis Fukuyama has suggested that enhancement technologies would cause us to "no longer have the characteristics that give us human dignity."

[2] This normative force for equality within society does have its ugly side, e.g., slowing the bright kids down for "No Child Left Behind".

[3] I think it's fairly clear that transhumanist technologies will increase the divides within society and corrode our culture of equality: not only will there likely be uneven access to these technologies, and uneven knowledge about them, but there's a strong status quo bias in the human psyche. These technologies will be new, different, and sometimes very strange. A divide is a divide- and causes problems- regardless of whether it happens by chance or by choice.

[4] The philosophy of transhumanism, though relatively developed and fleshed out, is not the presumptive solution here because it simply hasn't proven acceptable to the general public. Maybe version 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0 will be the one that finally gains traction and appeals to more than a small subset of the population. But- no offense meant to transhumanists- it's clearly not there yet.

The Change Congress Movement

2008-03-28T22:45:00.003-05:00

Lawrence Lessig has announced an extraordinarily important- and what I hope will be an extraordinarily effective- movement to reform Congress. If you listen to one speech on politics this year, make it this one.

On Wikipedia's Immune System

2008-03-23T11:48:00.004-05:00

Wikipedia's immune system is impressive, but I think it scales more poorly and devolves more easily than outsiders realize. Really, most of Wikipedia's current ills can be explained as a moderate form of autoimmune disease, caused by chronic inflammation of the community by vandals and trolls.

How do you treat autoimmune disease? I don't know. Will Citizendium avoid the same fate? I tend to think (hope) so.