Scanning for consciousness

Can technology tell us whether someone is conscious or not? Just barely.

How does the brain work? What causes or is that most basic phenomenon- consciousness? Many theists and philosophers dispair of ever finding an answer, or indeed of being able to properly pose the question, calling it the "hard" problem. Our intuitions are perhaps too strong to overcome this sense of magical awe, yet materialists plug along, going with the logical indications from evolution and biology that something very physical is going on in there to mount the drama that flits across our inner stage.

Functional MRI is regular MRI abetted by analysis of blood flow, which responds on a few-second time scale to changes in local brain activity, the brain being a big gas hog, as it were. One would think that with such technology in hand, it would a snap to detect the physical correlates of consciousness and describe all the patterns surrounding it. But no- the brain runs all the time, and the differences in blood flow under activity are very small. Also, the time scale of the key brain activities, like most brain waves, are far faster and spatially far smaller than what fMRI can detect, so it remains, sadly, an extremely blunt instrument.

A recent study looked at twelve volunteers as they went under with the anaesthetic propofol, of Michael Jackson fame. I doubt that propofol-induced unconsciousness resembles sleep very much, so while it may knock you out, it can hardly be the way to a refreshing wake-up the next day. Another study in 2011 , incidentally, did very similar work and came to the same conclusions, and also provides the rationale for using propofol in particular: "The reason why propofol was chosen for this study is that this particular anesthetic has been shown not to interfere with regional cerebral blood flow response at sedative concentrations, and does not modify flow-metabolism coupling in humans".

The researchers tried to measure brain activity in the broadest possible way, tracking correlations among far-flung areas. The upshot is that as sedation becomes deeper, even though over-all blood flow does not change as noted above, correlations among brain activities become increasingly local, losing their long-range character. Which is certainly in line with the general ideas in the scientific community about what consciousness is in physical term: large, wide-ranging, and constantly varying coalitions or patterns of neuronal activity, which are coherent in some sense. This coherence would represent thought to the experiencer, and detectable statistical correlations to the onlooker (inlooker?).

A map of the parcels used by the experimenters to divide up the brains of their subjects into regions of interest (ROI), in order to draw inter-regional activity correlations.

How can these correlations be drawn? "In our analysis the connection is the Pearson correlation  statistic between each pair of nodes." So, despite the crude time scale, they assumed that time-coincident activitions in different locations of the brain reflect functional connection, i.e. communication. They parcelled their brains out into 194 small regions, (using someone else's scheme from prior work), and then computed the average time course of activity within each parcel. Then using statistical methods, one can make a matrix of the correlations among all these time courses and parcels, into the figure below:

Region-to-region matrix of correlations under various conditions: W, waking; S, sedated; LOC, loss of consciousness, and R, recovery of consciousness (to Ramsay level 2).

Clearly, the condition of complete anesthesia (LOC) can be picked out as having sharply reduced connections between different regions, while even just after recovery, connections remain significantly impaired. "As expected, we found a significant effect of condition (... ), indicating that correlation strength systematically varied across conditions. Specifically, W consistently exhibited the strongest average correlation level, across all bins, followed by S and R, while LOC consistently exhibited the weakest average correlation across all bins." 

This result is stated more simply in a graph of correlation to distance apart:

The conclusion they  draw from this is that  the correlation at long distances are not specially impaired relative to that at medium distances. Connections at most distances are impaired, which would, however, naturally decimate long-range communication.

Meanwhile, within the individual regions, some showed increased activity (yellow) and some decreased (blue), consistent with the idea that the long-range effects are dominant overall.

Activity within nodes (also called regions, or regions of interest, ROI) at different levels of anesthesia. Yellow denotes higher activity in the sedated or unconscious states, while blue denotes higher activity in waking or recovery.

Let me wrap up with a couple more quotes from the paper:

"... we find that loss of consciousness is marked by an increase in normalized clustering (), which measures the ‘cliquishness’ of brain regions, potentially indicating an increase in localized processing and thus a decrease of information integration across the brain." 

"... our graph theoretic analysis further indicates that, in terms of network information processing, propofol-induced loss of consciousness is marked by a specific change in the quality of information exchange (i.e., decreased efficiency) ..."

So it remains extremely difficult to differentiate consciousness from living unconsciousness. This is very early days in the  decipherment of brain patterns, and we are far from having tricorders. But there really is something in there to peek at, and one gets the sense that yet more philosophical conundra will eventually be dissolving in this pool of data. Next week, another post on brain science, from a far loftier perspective- that of Douglas Hofstadter.

• More over-theorizing, characteristic of religion and right-wingery.
• How about watching TV intentionally?
• Who among us ... is trained to lie? To be lied to?
• Pakistani ambassador: Yes, we are totally nuts.
• Who would Jesus shoot?
• And how would Jesus treat the kids?
• Do you have any privacy on the interwebs? No.
• Criminals at Diebold corp? No problem. 
• Krugman on the dollar's vaunted international role ... not a big deal.
• ..and on the curious case of Japan- the debt that is not a problem.
• What should the top tax rate be?
• The future of work: good if we care about each other.
• The financial industry is uniquely suited to predation, corruption, and general asymmetry.
• Economic quote of the week, from Bill Black. He also speaks comprehensively about the criminality of our bankers in this podcast.

"The inconvenient facts that the senior officers of JPMorgan, Bear Stearns (Bear), and Washington Mutual’s (WaMu) grew wealthy through the frauds that drove the financial crisis and that JPMorgan’s senior officers will not be prosecuted and will not even have to repay the proceeds of their crimes never appear in the article."
...
"The CEOs’ paramount strategic objective is to prevent real investigations staffed by vigorous financial regulators working with FBI agents that lead to hundreds of grand jury investigations of elite bankers and civil suits, enforcement actions, and prosecutions that make public the facts about the elite frauds that drove the crisis. ... Fraud is criminal even if Holder is too spineless to prosecute it."

The end of Rome

What happens when the old gods no longer work?

The end of Rome is coming, in my listening of the fabulous History of Rome podcast, after countless episodes (~161). The capital of the Western Empire has been transferred to Ravenna, surrounded by impassable marshes and defensively superior to Milan or to Rome, the prior capitals. It is a stark admission that the Roman game from here out is defensive, not offensive. But where did the Roman empire reside? In the hearts and minds of people, not on a map. And when its rationale turned incoherent or sour, it died.

One has to consider the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity as part of this story. While Christianity and empire coexisted quite well for another millenium in the Byzantine empire, there is an inescapable correlation between conversion and decline in the Western Empire. Perhaps decline came first, and conversion was a symptom, as the old gods fell off their pedestals, disbelieved. In any case, for the West, Christianity seemed incompatible with the traditional Roman empire. Emperors spent their time dickering about the consubstantiality of Jesus, rather than worshipping power, war and violence in frank terms, as they had done in times gone by. It would all have been to the good if what came after Rome was an improvement, but it is another lesson that virtually any governance is better than none. Darkness and anarchy were the dividends. It took a very long time for the Goths, Franks, Vandals, et al. to assume the mantle of cultural renaissance.

Today, we are in a loosely similar moment. The free market god was, up until just yesterday, globally ascendent and hardly contested. Even the last major holdouts in the pagan bloc, China and Russia, converted with some enthusiasm, and now brandish the cross of mercantalism and international trade as cudgels.

But lo, the financial crisis has exposed Milton Friedman's God as less than regal and perfect. The magic of unfettered markets has a dark side: a license to defraud and destroy the livelihoods and savings of millions of people, as well as institutions of long standing. The bull of greed charged through the china shop of our communities and public institutions, and remains on the loose.

Only a few decades ago, the US was far less doctronaire. It had strong government that had learned many lessons from the Depression and world war, which taught that the public good takes precedence over private markets. Markets are great tools, fostering freedom, efficiency, and (some) innovation, but they are fully dependent on the state and have various defects and dysfunctions which mean that we should never imagine that they replace the need for a state or substitute for it to any great degree. Quite the opposite- they depend on the services of the state, and the rest of us depend on state to protect us from them. The health insurance & care industry is a prime example. The pending obamacare program is going to save the private system from itself, making it more efficient and usable than it has managed to be on its own.

Additionally, we have always harbored socialist planning in the very heart of the free market temple- the firm. Which runs internally like some soviet factory with its bosses, its shirkers, its senseless bureaucracy, and the ability of the top brass to skim off the cream .. just because they can. Internally, it is a fundamentally political organization rather than an economic one.

Unfortunately, the current crisis has given us the worst of both worlds. A crisis not severe enough to impair free market fanticism among its most faithful flock, (who continue to throw fundamentalist tantrums, even taking hostages), but severe enough to selectively disempower the poor and weak. There was an edge of revolution in the Occupy movement, but the dominant faith was too strong, and the alternative insufficiently clear. We are now on a longer road ... hopefully to recover our strength through a lengthy deconversion process, changing the basic ideology of the US back to a mixed and well-regulated system (polytheism, one might even call it) that we already know from our own example, and many others around the world, has the capacity to be prosperous, equitable, and durable.

• Surowiecki on inequality. 
• Stiglitz on inequality. "The gross domestic product of the United States has more than quadrupled in the last 40 years and nearly doubled in the last 25, but as is now well known, the benefits have gone to the top — and increasingly to the very, very top."
• The GOP has cost us $700 billion, and counting. And that isn't counting the latest week of antics from the clown posse.
• Annals of the easily led: Republicans wilt before faux-populist lobbyists.
• Annals of religious brainwashing, cont.
• Yet another Christian delusion.
• Some basic / applied principles from MMT.
• Bill Mitchell deconstructs one nobel prize winner.
• Even the Fed finds that QE is useless. "Currently the U.S. real GDP is about 10% below its long-run trend (see Figure 2) and total asset purchases stand at $3.7 trillion (or less than 25% of GDP). Our model predicts that this level of asset purchases (even if permanent) would have little effect on aggregate output and employment even though it could reduce the real interest rate significantly by 2 to 3 percentage points."
• Quote of the week: Andrew Fieldhouse on why inequality is getting worse, much worse:

"Meanwhile, the U.S. labor market is only about one-fifth the way to a full recovery; and as long as the jobs crisis festers, inflation-adjusted wages will stagnate or fall for the vast majority of workers."
...
"Recent U.S. income inequality data published by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty show that the top 1 percent of households by income has captured a staggering 95 percent of total income gains between 2009 and 2012, compared with 68 percent of gains between 1993 and 2012."

• And, Bill Mitchell on job creation:

"I have been to many meeting where policy makers, usually very well adorned in the latest clothing, plenty of nice watches and rings, and all the latest gadgets (phones, tablets etc), wax lyrical about how complex the poverty problem is. I usually respond at some point (trying my hardest to disguise disdain) by suggesting the problem is relatively simple. The federal government can always create enough work any time it chooses at a decent wage to ensure that no-one needs to live below the poverty line. Read: always!"

• And, Bill Black spells out the nitty gritty of lending fraud:

"It was lenders and their agents who overwhelmingly put the lies in “liar’s” loans."
...
"The fundamental point is that by 2006, fraudulent lenders were originating over two million fraudulent liar’s loans annually and that the only way to sell such loans to the secondary market was to compound the loan origination fraud with fraudulent “reps and warranties” about the quality of the loans."

• And, Yves Smith, on the next fixation of the right, not entirely without merit:

"So now you can see how the assault on public sector workers fits in. When I was young, teachers and government employees were modestly paid, but they did have job security and decent pensions. Now that the wages of well and even merely adequately paid private sector workers have been beaten down, suddenly these not all that terrific compensation levels arouse jealousy among the newly disenfranchised, who now demand that public sector workers join them in the race to the bottom. Once this sort of beggar thy neighbor attitude is institutionalized, and it has been in many circles, it’s hard to reverse. But if we are going to restore the standing of the middle class, it’s time to reject the notion of competitive pay levels which can be used to justify class warfare, and return to the older, successful model of sharing the benefits of productivity gains between workers and management, rather than having it all go to the rentiers."

Unconstitutional practices in both houses

Majority rule is constitutional. Minority rule is not.

We have been through the sorry spectacle of the Senate being held hostage by a minority of its members, via the filibuster and other "rules". Indeed in much of its business, a single senator may "hold" action indefinitely. It is thus not only a dysfunctional, but also an unconstitutional, body. Much of this derives from the wish of each member to be a prima dona and mini-president, but for the institution as a whole and for the country, it is a disaster.

The current Republican hostage-taking over Obamacare, "spending", and the misunderstood debt puts a spotlight on the same phenomenon in the House of Representatives, where a straight vote would pass both the budget and the debt ceiling, but the Republicans deny such a vote due to their "Hastert rule", which renders the House both dysfunctional and unconstitutional. This self-imposed rule uses the procedural powers of the speakership to deny any bill a vote unless it has majority support of Republican members. Not a majority of the House at large, but only of the Republicans.

The founders didn't even think it worth mentioning in their masterwork- the constitution- that each legislative body would pass bills based on a majority vote. It was so blindingly obvious and implicit that only a dolt would imagine that other rules might be brought into play. But here we are.

What the constitution does say on the matter is:

"Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a law, be presented to the President of the United States: If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law."

and: 

"Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member."

Here, as in only a very few other cases, super-majority requirements are mentioned, clearly because it is so rare relative to the default case of majority rule.

It is unimaginable that the founders would have accepted the kind of "rules" or proceedings that both the Senate and House have since lashed themselves to, requiring special or super-majorities for any action but those explicitly mentioned in the constitution. They were opposed to party politics in any case, but to see our great deliberative bodies so hamstrung not only by partisan rancor, but by insidious "rules" by which partisan minorities can stifle public action, would be most maddening. The constitution they constructed already had so many divided powers, elite-friendly voting mechanisms, and brakes on precipitate action that this extra degree of dysfunction is, frankly, sadomasochistic. Or sclerotic, take your pick.

Imagine if the House leadership decided on a rule that Speaker Boehner gets one vote and all others get none. They can make their own rules, right? That would certainly simplify matters, and even promote expeditious decisionmaking. The bounds on these internal Senate and House rules seem to be whatever they can get away with without raising too many suspicions of unconstitutionality. And their point is generally to give power to the powerful, instead of promoting deliberation and the equal distribution of power in what were clearly constructed to be one-man one-vote bodies.

We need to find a way out of this mess. The Republican party may be doing the nation a favor by immolating before our eyes, thus perhaps losing the next election. But a more durable way to address these legislative dysfunctions might be for the President or others with standing to take the matter to the Supreme court and have them put some bounds on the internal procedures with which the congressional bodies can steal the rights of the majority. Even within the now-rabidly conservative court, the clear intent of the founders should not pass completely unnoticed.

Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #78:

"If it be said that the legislative body are themselves the constitutional judges of their own powers, and that the construction they put upon them is conclusive upon the other departments, it may be answered, that this cannot be the natural presumption, where it is not to be collected from any particular provisions in the Constitution. It is not otherwise to be supposed, that the Constitution could intend to enable the representatives of the people to substitute their will to that of their constituents. It is far more rational to suppose, that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority"

• Honestly, the tea party is really just the South, all over again.
• Smart or dumb? Either way the contemporary right is toxic.
• Is something wrong at the Fed?
• The devil is still about, and wilier than ever!
• Democracy for sale.
• How to make extremely important web sites not work.
• Newt led the slide in our political system to terrorism.
• Mariana Mazzucato- is the economic ship starting to turn?
• Swiss basic income proposal.. better to have guaranteed income, or a guaranteed job?
• Annals of the easily led: how FOX|RUSH operates like a religious cult.
• Economic and/or political quote of the week, from Bill Mitchell, quoting Mason Gaffney:

"... the American education system had been corrupted especially in the era of secret ballot and direct democracy where 'voters could no longer be bought … they had to be brainwashed' and the device chosen was 'Neo-classical Economics, which blurred all distinctions between producers and rentiers'."

Nietzsche, nyet

The boorish philosopher, Friederich Nietzsche

There seems to always be room for a few prominent atheists, perhaps just to keep the pot boiling. From Voltaire to Dawkins, a sort of prophetic / jester slot exists in the culture ... a talk show provocateur, out to unsettle the settled pieties of the age, even if the age, like ours, is largely atheist to start with.

Nietzsche briefly played this part with his famous pronouncement that god is dead, we killed it, and we had better come up with some other moral landscape for ourselves in its absence. An excellent review of Nietzsche's thinking is Rüdiger Safranski's philosophical biography, which lopes through Nietzsche's life and works with enthusiastic but also critical eyes.

I have to say, however, that I do not share Safranski's enthusiasm. I find Nietzsche in the end undisciplined, unsystematic, unsympathetic, and unconvincing. For all the flashes of insight, his thought does not lend itself to a coherent critique of his own or the contemporary age, let alone to the progressive, liberal, meliorist political and social direction that I believe is culturally desirable.

Let's do some quotes, to get a feel for the area. Safranksy describes Nietzsche's mid-career infatuation with Wagner, and the possibilities of art serving religious functions for modern man:

"If art is to rescue the essence of religion, it must succeed in bringing about a lasting inner transformation of people. Ephemeral pleasure in art will not suffice. The will to art as religion pushed at the boundaries of the merely aesthetic event, wihch is a source of great distress to artists who, like Wagner, regard themselves as founders of a religion. ...
Wagner sought to achieve a sacral, redemptive effect by means of his *Gesamtkunstwerk. Art must mobilize all of its power. The music supplies a language for the 'inexpressible,' which comprehends only feelings, and combines with the action on the stage, the gestures, the facial expressions, the sert design, and, above all, the solemn ritual of the festival days in which people gather around the altar of art."

All this is certainly well known on the religion side of the culture, from the sumptuous Catholic processions to the pop-guitars at your local megachurch. But always, there is a point. What is the point of Wagner's über-art, or in turn, of Nietzsche's version of the same principle? As far as I can make out, it was not the spreading of compassion, or the communal nationalism founded on an enacted origin myth. It seems to have been self-reflexive, art for art's sake, because art makes us feel so great.

I agree with the importance of art in this way, but it will hardly supplant religion on this principle alone. Something more would be needed - content.

The content, as far as any exists, is hazy nationalism and general Germanic cultural triumphalism. In this, neither Wagner nor Nietzsche were Nazis before their time. But the Nazis were heavily Wagnerian and Nietzschean. They saw quite clearly the tone of what both had done. The total artistic spectacle was something the Nazis were particularly enamored of, as documented so well by Leni Riefenstahl.

But Nietzsche did have some penetrating insights into the science-religion and science-art debates, as summarized by Safranski:

"It is common belief that the mere presence of something is the simplest thing in the world, but actually it is the most puzzling thing of all. It is easier and more natural to imagine a God and an entire animated nature, because in doing so we project onto the external world what we ourselves are- namely spirit, consciousness, and soul. The greatest challenge is to posit a blind, opaque, merely existing being. .. By immersing himself in the attributes of knowledge, Nietzsche touched on the enigma of being devoid of consciousness. He contended that it is the spontaneous tendency of knowledge to encounter its own principle in all of nature precisely because being devoid of consciousness is actually inconceivable and unfamiliar to it. 'In the great prehistorical era of mankind, spirit was presumed to be everywhere and it did not occur to people to revere it as a privilege of man'".

Which is what Freud would later term "projection". And what relationship do either science or art have to truth?

"Artists shape, create, and produce a new reality. Scientists observe reality. The artists provides forms, and the scientist supplies truth. From the perspective of the artist, Nietzsche discovered in science a fictionality that tended to remain suppressed and unacknowledged. Science seeks truth, but the imagination is also engaged in the process- more than scientists care to admit. Science aims at finding truths, but invents them as well. Art readily acknowledges its basis is imagination; it creates a world of illusions and weaves a beautiful cloak to lay over reality. Whereas science demands that truth be unveiled, art loves veils. Since art is well-versed in invention, it is no secret to art how much invention and drive for refined education is involved in science, much as science is loath to acknowledge that. Nietzsche called this disparity the 'problem of science' as seen from the perspective of art. 

When Nietzsche ventured to contemplate art from the perspecitive of science, he found that its central quandry was a claim to truth. This claim to truth is generally just as unacknowledged in art as is fictionality in science. Art wraps its implicit claim to truth in illusions, and science conceals its implicit fictionality in its claim to truth. Nietzsche attacked art for feigning truth that it cannot provide."

Obviously, this applies particularly to that art called religion, whose veils are steeped in the deepest shades of denial.

Safranski discusses the Greek culture of scientific truth and philosophy, as exemplified by Socrates:

"According to Nietzsche, however, if reality is regarded as increasingly penetrable and controllable, if the first material successes of this culture of knowledge occur in the areas of technology, production, medicine, and the social sphere, and if the hitherto alarming phenomena of natural forces become natural and thus calculable and theoretically controllable causalities, a feeling of optimism extends irght down to those in the lower social strata, who will now begin to share in the dream of the 'earthly happiness of all'. If it become increasingly more feasible to control nature by means of the sciences, why should it not be possible to eliminate the injustice that in inherent in society as well?"

But Nietzsche was not pleased by this prospect at all.

"Nietzsche regarded the Socratic spirit, scientific progress, and democratic upheaval as linked together in this manner. Why, then, was this state of affairs so unappealling to him? Why was he afraid of democracy? We have already seen the answers to these questions in our earlier discussion of his defense of slavery. ... 'In order to have a broad, deep, and fertile soil for  artistic development, the overwhelming majority must be slavishly subjected to the necessities of life to serve a minority beyond the measure of its individual needs.'"

This brings us to the Übermensch, Nietzsche's model of his ideal, a person with no morals or scruples, other than self-actualization. A psychopath, in short. But a highly artistic one, with lots of slaves! One can tell that the Nazis were reading closely here, despite their lip service to socialism and "Volk". The Führer principle is laid out here, in a way.

"In great men, the specific characteristics of life- injustice, lies, and exploitation- are at their greatest."

While one can make many allowances for a philosopher being provocative and seeking book sales, (at this point late in his [sentient] career, Nietzsche had sold hardly any books), the drumbeat of elitism, anti-democratic principles, and valorization of power and ruthlessness is as persistent and unmistakable as it is unforgivable. Nietzsche knew very well what he was doing. He knew the slave societies of antiquity, and took them as his model so that exemplary thinkers and artists (such as himself!) could justify humanity by their own existence and works, and somehow push it forward to something solipsistically called "progress".

The irony is that, for all his vaunted re-evalution of all values, and dismissal of the sheep-ethics of Christianity, Nietzsche was the ultimate Victorian, a prisoner of his time, infatuated with the romanticism of power and of the "great man": in history and in art (and in philosophy!). A romanticism that led straight into the world wars of the next century. It was almost as bad as the Hegelian romanticism of inevitable historical dialectic, which led to its own brand of horrors.

A great culture is made up of more than great men, great works, and great passions. It is made of everyone else too, and of empathy and decency and self-discipline. Of functioning institutions, broad prosperity, and cosmopolitan values. Apollo had a point, as much as Dionysus, and indeed, without patient Apollonian cultural structure and continuity, no Dionysian exuberance can develop into great works, however defined. I'll end with Nietzsche's sneering put-down of bourgeois values, in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra":

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.  

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.
"We have discovered happiness" -- say the Last Men, and they blink.  

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth. Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!  

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death. One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one. One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.  

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
"Formerly all the world was insane," -- say the subtlest of them, and they blink. 

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled -- otherwise it upsets their stomachs. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.  

"We have discovered happiness," -- say the Last Men, and they blink.

• America, breaking bad.
• How did the homeless get here?
• Why we are for Obamacare.
• We can cleanly resolve the debt ceiling issue.
• Republicans and democracy. Note how Republicans are trying to get by extortion what they can not get by democratic means- you know, by electing a majority of lawmakers, or by persuading them by policy arguments. Looks like they have taken a page from Al Qaeda. There are any number of issues, such as NSA lawlessness, high unemployment, lack of prosecution of white collar crime, where the Republicans as a party out of power could mount a very persuasive case for policy change on the merits. But the proposals they choose to make have no merits, at least not in a democratic system, to the majority of citizens, so they resort to terrorism. It is shameful and appalling.
• But hey, at least the base respects their GOP.
• Joan Walsh seems a little fed up.
• Why the mortgage market will never go private.
• “It was also generally accepted that the incomes of the wealthy should be left untouched in all but the gravest emergencies.”
• Media patsies didn't do much investigating of the financial crisis either. Fraud and embezzlement were rampant.
• Markets aggregate perspectives, not just information. But are they rational? Not really.
• Winner-take-all, or cheater-take-all?
• Financial advisors are routinely unethical and do not meet a fiduciary standard.

Protein shimmy & shake

Hemoglobin is a complicated puzzle, not just a carrier of oxygen.

Hemoglobin- the stuff of love and horror, cupid's arrows and Dracula's lust.. what makes it tick? What even makes it red? It certainly isn't the protein. 16,000 daltons of clear protein carry a clear ~700 dalton heme group, whose iron, neatly caged in the middle, only absorbs green to blue light strongly when bound to oxygen. So a very small, if critically important, bit of the protein complex is responsible for all of its color. A bit like the heart being responsible for all of our love.

But the encasing protein does a lot more than just lug the heme ring and its iron around. It is responsible for a few special effects that make our breathing more efficient. These are called allosteric effects, for the way miscellaneous molecules can reshape or regulate a protein, especially its binding of other molecules. One is the Bohr effect, where CO2 (and acidity in general) regulates the oxygen affinity of hemoglobin. In the high CO2 / elevated acid environment of the peripheral tissues, oxygen affinity is reduced, while in the more neutral environment of the lungs, it is raised, appropriately enough.

Another is the cooperativity of the hemoglobin tetramer. Binding one oxygen increases the affinity of the other (and quite distant) three sites for oxygen, again helping speed the process of loading and unloading oxygen in the appropriate places. And a third is the Haldane effect, where, conversely to oxygen, the binding of CO2 is increased in the acidic environment of the periphery. CO2 doesn't bind to the central iron-heme site, but elsewhere on the protein molecule, facilitated by several acid-sensitive histidines.

Fourth is the action of carbon monoxide, which is not really allosteric, but simply competitive, binding 200 times better than oxygen to the central iron binding site, and thereby shutting it down completely, suffocating the victim. The encasing protein of course has other functions as well, and we see one in sickle cell anemia, where the normally cleanly separated tetramers that float around in the red blood cell at very high concentration (35 grams per 100g of packed red blood cells) start to gum up and aggregate due to a single point mutation, (when present in both genetic copies), leading to misshapen red blood cells, and all the other morbidities of this disease.

While most of this molecular intricacy is understood in rough terms, researchers are still nailing down details, and a recent paper used novel statistics and molecular modelling to tease out some more of them. Hemoglobin could be thought of having two stable shapes, called T (tense, with low oxygen affinity, high CO2 affinity), and R (relaxed, with high oxygen affinity, low CO2 affinity). The issue is that in the tetrameric hemoglobin complex of two alpha chains and two beta chains, binding one oxygen in the T state nudges not just its own unit of the tetramer, but all four, toward the R state.

Obviously this requires some complicated transmission mechanism, and that remains the subject of research, including this one. Here is a picture: 

Animation of a hemoglobin tetramer shape changes, focusing on one subunit (reddish) and especially its heme group as it binds O2 (teal).

The researchers tried to break down all the motions of the protein chains into two categories- those that change the relative positions of the four subunits, (quaternary), and those that only affect the internal shape of one subunit, (tertiary), without jutting out to affect the others. This was done with computer simulations based on the many known structures of this protein. Hemoglobin was naturally one of the first protein structures ever solved at the atomic level.

What they found was that they could statistically boil down each of these two classes of shape change into one main value (a principal component). Then the question was how these values and detailed motions relate to each other as the major transition goes along from state to the other. One aspect of the internal (tertiary) motions were clearly correlated to the inter-subunit repositioning, and so could be taken to be part of the allosteric mechanism by which one subunit communicates its binding of oxygen to the others. Much of this analysis is unfortunately cloaked on mathematical abstrusities, ensembles, hyperplanes, etc., so I can neither evaluate it nor fully present it.

They decide that they can differentiate between individual "pushing" and "pulling" contacts between subunits, which significantly channel the interaction. The whole story begins with the binding of oxygen, which pushes away protein arms that reach towards the central heme, and also induces that heme to bend from a bent, to a flat, planar shape:

Edge-on view of hemoglobin heme complex, bent without bound O2, and flat when O2 binds, along with a few other local rearrangements.

Table of dynamic contacts within and between hemoglobin subunits that stretch or switch as oxygen binds and the shape changes from R to T. The amino acids are referred to by single letter codes.

A pushing contact ...

 "A clear example for this is the interaction of lysine 82 of beta 1 and lysine 82 of beta 2 we observed: Close to the T-state both side chains are pointing into the solvent. While moving along cQ [the quaternary-only axis], the two chains approach each other and bring both positively charged side chains unfavourably close. The motion along cTew [the tertiary-only axis] relaxes this repulsive interaction by bending the N-terminal ends of the F helices (the helix notation goes back to Watson, Kendrew and Perutz [16]). Experimental studies introduced cross-links between the two lysines [17], [18]. The derived structure was described to be an intermediate between T- and R-state with characteristics of both states but no cooperativity."

 A pulling contact ...

 "These contacts only stay intact if the system moves along cQ [the quaternary-only axis] and cTew [the tertiary-only axis] together, but break if moving in one or the other direction independently. This is the expected behaviour for contacts which must remain intact for the allosteric mechanism to function. Exemplarily, this was observed for phenylalanine 117 of the alpha subunits and argenine 30 of the beta subunits. The hydrogen bond between the carboxylic oxygen of Phe and the side chain of Arg breaks while moving from the T-state towards the off-diagonal intermediate artificial states (see Figure 3), and forms again when approaching the R-state." 

 Which is to say that the contact stays intact during the actual transition, but was broken here in virtual model terms as the experimenters pursued one or the other of their axes (tertiary or quaternary) alone. It is a sign that this contact helps keep things together in a smooth and concerted fashion as the protein starts to change shape on one side.

A more dramatic type of contact is one that switches during the transition. In the alpha-beta interface, (shown below), contact between apartate 94 on the alpha subunit and tryptophan 37 on the beta subunit (in the T state) is broken and the tryptophan 37 switches to contact asparagine 102 on the beta subunit in the R state. These kinds of distinct shifts help stabilize each of the quasi-stable states, T and R, and the researchers identified four such "switching" contacts.

Cartoon of the subunit border area where tryptophan (W) 37 switches from asparagine (N) 102 to aspartate (D) 94 during the oxygen binding transition, among other changes.

It is remarkable that two atoms- O2- can switch the conformation of an enormous complex with an atomic weight of ~64,000. But it is all in a day's work for proteins, whose structures to start with are relatively floppy in the intense jostling of brownian motion. Putting those flops to work by evolving into structures with two stable states, tickle-able by joined-at-the-hip partners.. that is a bit more challenging, but obviously a life-saver given the absurdly inefficient breathing apparatus we are stuck with.

• On the development of capitalism, its inequality, and its morality.
• Misleading information is highly, highly effective.
• "What was the response to your coming out as an atheist? An enormous number of Christians have threatened to do physical harm to me."
• Xerces: Effects of neonicotinoid insecticides on agriculturally important beneficial insects.
• High time to do low-carbon web design.
• Music makes you better.
• A program for restoration of accountability, civil liberties and privacy.
• Rational expectations is pretty much the opposite of what the data shows. "To understand the past and avoid a recurrence of the devastating events we lived through so recently, we need to acknowledge that investors and financial markets do not behave the way rational asset price theory implies."
• But the rich.. yes, they have rational expectations, of privilege.
• Corporate profits at all-time high.
• Non-regulation by the bank regulators. No wonder we are still on FIRE.
• Outsourcing mortgage & foreclosure fraud- the nightmare continues.
• Dumbest retirement policy in the world. And don't forget, Social security is going to screw post-'60 baby boomers as well. The new retirement age is 70.

Horses running wild

Reaping the harvest of an unbalanced ecosystem.

A fascinating review in Science recently laid out the condition of the federal Wild Horses and Burros program. It isn't a pretty sight. The program is severely fenced in by its legal structure. Firstly, the number of wild horses must be kept down to about 30,000, over various Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands centered around Nevada. This limits both competition with ranchers, and prevents disturbing scenes of mass starvation and overpopulation were the herd to expand to its ecological potential. Second, the excess horses can't be killed, but must be put up for adoption or put out to (non-wild) pasture on the BLM dime, in perpetuity.

Map of BLM lands with wild horses.

The BLM at this point is offering prospective owners $500 to adopt their mustangs, but still can't find nearly enough takers. The agency maintains a population of roughly 43,000 horses (males are castrated) in captivity, having removed a total of 200,000 horses from the wild over the last forty years. And it spends about $46 million on its captive horses, a number that is destined to go up, by the analysis of this article, due to increasing reproduction and capture rates from the wild herds.

This is all a little nuts. While it is admirable that US citizens, speaking through their representatives, dislike the prospect of killing horses that we capture from the wild for a wider ecological (and rancher) benefit, this squeamishness is very expensive, and hardly prevents much suffering, assuming that not all the captive pastures are run under ideal conditions, and that humane methods of killing (let's say euthanizing!) the horses exist.

Now the article authors and others (humane society, NRC) call for massive contraceptive intervention on the wild herd, shooting them up with a vaccine that can reduce reproduction when properly applied to domestic horses, though how it would actually be carried out from a distance (say, helicopters) is not at all clear. Again, another enormous commitment in perpetuity to manage a population that lacks the key element needed for natural balance: an appropriate predator.

Where is the wolf? Extirpated in Nevada. Where are the cougars? In the mountains, and not very interested in hunting horses. They are also managed closely and have their paws full dealing with an enormous population of deer. Where are the cheetas? Back in Africa.  Where are the bears? Mostly extirpated. So it is either us or disease & starvation that is going to limit the wild horse population.

It brings to mind the question of why horses died out in the Americas in the first place. We really have no good explation. After evolving here for tens of millions of years, the horse left for good around 12,000 years ago, along with the rest of the American megafauna. One gets the distinct impression that they were hunted to extinction by our less-squeamish ancestors, but it is rather hard to square such a theory with the horse's subsequent success across Asia.

We have no problem killing untold millions of other animals- cows, sheep, chickens- to eat and wear, and even manage to euthanize our pets. Why not horses? We seem under the spell of an archetype here- of the wild, born-to-be-free animal totem of a world that is long gone. I for one would be all for restoring a bit of that world in the form of predators to make up a more balanced ecosystem. We need more wolves. But if we don't want wolves on the prowl through the Western ranges, we need to step up and do the job ourselves, rather than telling a bureaucracy to do the impractical or impossible, to hide the problem in far-off corrals and pastures.

• Homo economicus & Homo politicus ... are we purely competitive (and fearful), or are we other things as well?
• Christianity and its cults. Or is the whole thing a cult?
• Atheist gunned down.
• Does religion make people depressed?
• Reason really doesn't work well, either.
• Median household makes less today than it did in 1989, in real terms.
• Status quo bias breeds acceptance of unacceptable conditions.
• Economic quote of the week, from Martin Wolf;

"So what happened on October 10 [2008]? The finance ministers and central bank governors of the Group of Seven leading high-income countries, meeting in Washington, declared that they would “take decisive action and use all available tools to support systemically important financial institutions and prevent their failure” (my emphasis). The core global financial system became the ward of the states. The idea that this was a private system was revealed to be an illusion. Taxpayers woke up to discover that bankers were exceptionally highly paid and out-of-control civil servants."

• And, from Edward McClelland:

"Between 1970 and today, the share of the nation’s income that went to the middle class – households earning two-thirds to double the national median – fell from 62 percent to 45 percent."

State and Firm: the transition from predation

As governments become more democratic and accountable, do workplaces?

The classic interpretation of the state is that of gradual transition (hopefully progress!) from the Hobbesian war of all against all, to organized banditry, to stationary banditry, to feudalism & aristocracy, and ultimately, by degrees, to increasing regard and accommodation to the populous subjects of the state, to the point where in a democracy, the ruled are, and control, the rulers for the broadest interest of all. A nice story, though the current rule by Wall Street looks like a step backwards in some respects. Corruption serves as another method of predation, more or less organized, available to individuals and state organizations at most levels of the progression.

The firm could be viewed similarly, coming from a Marxist perspective (thanks to Bill Mitchell for a couple of blogs on the topic). As feudalism wore down, its forms of control split between the public state and private capitalism. A transitional example of the latter was the plantation economy of the American South. Capitalists need to exploit labor, as the feudal lords exploited their serfs and other subjects. How is this done, other than through management? Management wears the two faces of, on the one hand, guiding and facilitating the work of the firm, putatively something salable on the open market, and thus of positive social value both to customers and to the workers who create it (assuming they are voluntarily employed). The other face is that of guardian of the interests of capital, extracting as much surplus value as possible from the workers, and paying as little as possible. Making use of the labor market, such as it is, and the political system, and any other tools, including in the not too distant past, physical violence, to keep labor powerless, subservient, and poor. Additionally, other resources than labor are  treated similarly. Public goods are expropriated or destroyed for private profit, patents poached, public officials corrupted, public institutions coopted, and media blanketed with disinformation, for any possible advantage.

My question is whether the predation of the firm has replicated the more or less progressive trajectory of the state, or whether progress in that relationship has stagnated over recent decades. For the state, the world has been swept by democracy. Even the Arab world has caught wind of this trend, though it is ending in tears in some precincts. Civil rights have expanded, to ethnic minority populations, to women, and to sexual and other minorities. Even with the sclerosis and backsliding we see in the US political system, with the top-heavy security state and war establishment, the people, in their media-addled state, are in control when they want to be.

To the original question, one would have to say, no. Death is no longer a routine part of predatory capitalism- workplaces have become safer for most workers. But the economic divide between workers and those they work for has grown enormously, which shows heightened predation over the last few decades. All labor productivity gains have gone to capital, and none to labor. Peonage has made a comeback in the form of predatory lending. This is hard to defend on any rational or moral basis, and one has to conclude that, through the many tools of politics, media, corporate governance, and ideology, capital has grown more predatory rather than less, contrary to the trend of lower predation by the public state.

Ironically, the ideologues of the capital have used the language of civil rights, equal play, and freedom from the evil public predatory state to defend the capacity of capital and employers to predate on workers. The entrepreneur is celebrated as the free spirit who brings immeasurable value to the masses, and whose freedom to organize must not be impinged. Yet the worker's freedom to organize and create a counter-capital power structure that, among other things, raises pay - that is a different story! Collusion in the boardroom, to pay each other in crony capitalist terms and evade accountability ... no problem there. But collusion among the cubicles is not to be tolerated. The irony continues as labor gets paid less, and can buy less, leading to a seizure of the macro-economic cycle that the entrepreneur was supposed to be leading by his miraculous "supply-side" efforts. Which only serves to unmask the whole exercise as one of simple greed by the top end of town.

Of course the Marxist question is whether this whole setup was fair in the first place. Does the mere possession of money entitle a person to the perpetual future flow of more money, via rents and profit streams? Is this truly consistent with human values and just deserts? Back when capital was scarce, this practice / ideology may have made more sense. But today, when capital is not at all scarce, (as shown by the level of interest rates), the economic and political machinations required to keep & even grow power in the hands of capital appear to be an unseemly anachronism, counter to the public interest.

But putting aside the deservedness of the capitalist and the managerial class, and assuming that private firms do work that serves the public interest, (or could be appropriately regulated to do so), perhaps a more fundamental question is on the labor side. How many workers need the specter of poverty, low-wage jobs, and social stigma to be lashed to work? Could our society function if everyone who works was paid decently by their employer, and not forced to collect extra money from the government to relieve their employer of the burden? Could our society function with public service jobs offered to everyone wanting to work at a decent floor wage, and with a lower maintenance payment to those unable to meet even a basic work standard? Could private employers function having to pay more for labor? Would having fewer fast food establishments and other services, and higher food prices be an acceptable price for having everyone live in dignity? Would the number forsaking the private workforce for public service jobs exceed the number that has been involuntarily thrown out of work by the business cycle? And if so, would that be a bad thing?

Most people want to work. They want to be useful and not on any dole. But the current system, controlled for the interests of capital, (and also by the blind vagaries of the free market, leading to highly damaging booms and busts), generates a large army of unemployed and underemployed. Which in turn leads to immediate waste and disgruntlement, and long-term generational dysfunction. We can build a better system, and with a modicum of management in the public interest, which our government has proven itself capable of in the past, we can create not only a far more compassionate country, but one with higher prosperity and economic well-being for the vast majority of citizens.

• Rich people in a democracy.. the use of idiot populism.
• Stiglitz chimes in- inequality is engineered, and poisonous.
• Just who gets to collude / organize in the modern economy?
• Poverty is still very high.
• Brainwashing and Christianity. Sort of a system of terror. Especially in Texas.
• Hell:  the psychology is way too strong to just do away with it.
• Carbon and business as usual- not a happy future.
• Let's get rid of coal.
• Renewables are still approaching parity.
• The Taliban is now using clear-and-hold.
• Those selfless non-prosecutors, non-regulators at the SEC. And derelict reporters into the bargain. And why isn't the NSA snooping at the real evil-doers?
• We still need that Tobin tax.
• Subprime is right back in the saddle.
• Chemical corruption in the US.
• Economic quote of the week, from Paul Krugman: 

"So what can be done? For the moment, the kind of transformation that took place under the New Deal — a transformation that created a middle-class society, not just through government programs, but by greatly increasing workers’ bargaining power — seems politically out of reach. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on smaller steps, initiatives that do at least a bit to level the playing field..., for example,... universal prekindergarten education, paid for with a small tax surcharge on those with incomes over $500,000. ... For extreme inequality is still on the rise — and it’s poisoning our society."

• Economic graph of the week, showing the trillions of output and income (roughly 5 to 10 trillion at current count) that have been stolen / lost due to the economic debacle caused by our leading financial institutions, including derelict regulatory officers and instutions. All to keep the casino going for the top end.

Bach: a book

Review of Eric Siblin's "The Cello Suites"

This is a good book, a little over-written, and a little self-indulgent. Siblin presents parallel portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach, composer of his six famous cello suites, and Pablo Cassals, who resurrected them into the top-drawer recital pieces they remain today.

It is extremely interesting, and probably the material on Cassals was added to fill out the void that is our knowledge of Bach's personal life. But to me it seemed a strongly tragic story, with Bach unrecognized as a great composer in his lifetime, and his wife dying in paupery. How could this be? Now, Bach is all the rage, with full releases of his hundreds of cantatas, and thorough scholarship of his over one thousand-work catalog. But in his day, GF Handel couldn't be bothered to visit Bach even when passing through a town 25 kilometers away. And those famous suites where pretty much unknown for almost two hundred years after being written.

It makes you wonder whether disco is going to take the world by storm in some future epoch. Music goes in and out of fashion, and in Bach's time, his music was very much going out of fashion, which was travelling from sacred polyphony to popular opera and homophonic song (in the early 1700's). He was as fusty in his musical tastes as in his politics, religion, and dress. But the music, ah! Bach also didn't get around much. After visiting the Hamburg area in his youth, he spent his whole life in his homeland of Saxony. Having 20 children probably didn't leave much time for travel.

Speaking of which, the notorious genetics of the Bach family are a clear indication of eugenics (or at least assortative mating) at work. That musical talent is heritable seems as clear as the heritability of intelligence, height, and all sorts of other behavioral and physical traits. Whether we have the philosophical or moral foundation to even want to put such principles into practice is a separate question, but the potential is obvious enough.

Bach is, moreover, characteristic of great composers and great periods of composition in that he was paid more or less by the yard. Like the great broadway composers, (Richard Rodgers comes to mind), or the Motown era, it was simply expected, in the competitive system of the day, to crank out music continously, on demand. And the fascinating thing is that some composers rise remarkably to such conditions.

And, heartbreakingly enough, some unknown portion of Bach's work is lost. Siblin tells stories of Bach manuscripts found used for wrapping paper and for potting plants. His son C. P. E. Bach was the most filial and successful, but even his collection of his father's manuscripts was sold off under the auction hammer in 1788.

What makes music transcend its time? Innate quality is the first ingredient. But someone has to recognize it and perform it, which can demand going against fashion. The appreciation of other musicians finally turned the situation around for Bach's legacy. He was loved and appreciated by Beethoven and Mozart, but only really popularized by Felix Mendelssohn, who, in 1829, properly put on and publicized Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

Ever since, we have been treated to a flowing bach of music that seems as endless as it is astounding.

• More on labor and labor day.
  
• The carbon tax really works.
• A carbon tax that gives Greg Mankiw a big tax cut, but is regressive overall.
• The strength of climate heating brainwashing may be weakening. But only as long as the tax system can be made more regressive!
• A general climate plan.
• Where is the deterrence on white collar crime?
• Corrupt protection racket ... on the internet.
• Some cognitive problems in Christianity.
• The Taliban and women, continued.
• Hooray for modernity. And rationalism.
• Another problem with guns: forest fires.
• The absurdity of the Wall Street Journal. Do they even try to make sense anymore?
• A little finance is good. A lot is very bad.
• Economic quote of the week, on the productivity of finance, management, and capitalism in general, from Bill Mitchell:

"So the ideological push to make capitalism appear to be fair led to the development of marginal productivity theory. Thus, the theory became that people are paid according to their contribution to production. That was then represented as a fair system and was used politically to negate the claims that workers were being exploited."

Work is a fundamental value

What happened to family values, the work ethic, and bootstrap-pulling?

Judging by the actions of the current Republican class in congress, it is OK for 10 to 20 million Americans to loaf around, not doing anything productive. They and their families can decline into social disfunction and all the other ills associated with poverty. They can lose their skills and indeed desire for work. That is OK.

Sure, they should all help themselves, but with far fewer jobs than unemployed, and fewer decent jobs than poverty-level ones among those, it is a game of musical chairs with more than one chair missing. Sure, they should all start their own businesses, cleaning yachts or something, but the rich are not really in a spending mood. The rich (or other consumers) would have to spend more overall in order for this kind of entrepreneurial spirit to result in a net increase in jobs and higher economic activity. But they are still saving, and indeed complain that interest rates are too low, impeding their saving plans.

One wonders what ethical planet the Republicans, conservatives, and other chamber of commerce types are on. Did the imperatives of class war somehow over-rule their platitudes about hard work and family values? Has maintaining a vast reserve army of the unemployed, with all the employer power that represents, become more important than promoting a middle class with universal values of fair play, decent pay, and stable communities? It looks that way from here.

Unfortunately, with democracy in America (if not governance entirely) temporarily suspended in the interest of the moneyed interests, one can only propose better policies in an abstract, long-game sort of way. And the two we need are: a living minimum wage, and a guarantee of a job for everyone who wants to work. The two policies combine forces by paying a decent living salary to any citizen who wants work, to work for public projects and needs of which we have no shortage. Then private employers can bid on top of that to get the workers they need, if they have worthwhile work to do.

As we learned in the Great Depression, work is a fundamental value. Everyone needs to feel useful and do something useful. No one wants a handout when they could be helping others, earning their way, and supporting their family. The depression was not only economically, but psychologically devastating, with the realization that, due to some technical problems with the monetary and banking systems, a quarter of the population was suddenly denied work and thrown into poverty. The fundamental point and nature of the economy was put in question.

The last century also showed that no pure system, whether communist or free market, works sustainably by itself. We need elements of both for a healthy economy and culture. We need the freedoms and competitiveness of the private market system. And we also need intelligent policy and legal controls over market systems to make them work effectively, as well as robust safety nets that insure us all from their recurrent, inevitable failures on small and large scales.

On this labor day, it is time to realize that we in the US are rich enough to use all our labor at all times, out of both self-interested as well as compassionate motives.

• Low wages don't happen naturally.
• The new, bleak workscape.
• The politics of destruction, continued...
• Remember, in a recession/depression, fiscal spending is the only way to do it.
• Lying as a condition of business employment. And a justice system that curries to lying businesses. Who knew!?
• Blacks have made few significant economic gains in 50 years.
• There are still plenty of mysteries in genetics and development.
• FBI negligence: was a mega-economic crisis a fair price to pay for less terrorism?
• Music is good for us.. no kidding!
• Economic quotes of the week, from J.D. Alt: 

"The War Bonds and the Revenue Act creating the personal income tax, then, were specifically created not for the purpose of “collecting” money so the government could have it to spend—but rather for the purpose of destroying money so the government could then issue and spend even more dollars without feeding an uncontrolled inflationary spiral."

• .. and from Bill Mitchell on the class war, quoting Heidi Moore on a simple point about food stamps, welfare, earned income tax credits, and the like:

"The article points out that because of the appalling remuneration of low paid workers in the US, the provision of safety nets in the form of food stamps etc, means: '… that the government is paying to subsidize company profits: as businesses pay a minimum or near-minimum wage, their workers are forced to turn to government programs to make ends meet.'"

• Bonus note from Pakistan:

"In an effort to help clear Pakistan's clogged courtrooms, Pakistani officials have created a mobile court that will mediate small civil cases, minor criminal cases, and juvenile cases across the country (Reuters).  There are about 1.4 million cases pending in Pakistan and frustration over decades-long cases as led some litigants to turn to tribal jirgas instead.  While these councils offer instant decisions, sentences can include being buried alive, gang-raped, or stoned to death.  Court officials are hoping their mobile justice system, which launched on Tuesday, can offer an alternative.  The mobile court heard 29 cases in Peshawar during its first day in action and the government hopes to launch 11 more buses by the end of the year."

Empiricism: good for tiny and unimportant things!

Baseball succumbs to the video replay.

One attitude that intrigues me in discussion with defenders of religion is their appreciation of logic and science. They are often effusive about its value and relevance to all kinds of practical and mundane things. But when it comes to the so-called "big questions" and super-important topics, well, then intuition and whatever-I-feel-in-my-gut rules the day.

It is as if the enlightenment and multiple scientific revolutions came and went, in one ear and out the other. As if humans hadn't learned they are fallible, and do not intuitively come up with all the right answers about the structure of reality, automatically, by sheer inspiration. As if they still had an imaginary friend.

This all came to mind again when I read that baseball is finally giving in to the instant replay. Spectators at home watching their Tivo'd HDTV games can see all the bad officiating in excruciating detail, and the league can no longer hide behind a best effort / intuitive model of officiating. They are forced to deal with the actual truth, which may not come from the eyes of umpires, but more reliably from the unblinking camera. Like countless areas of science, sports is (reluctantly) transformed by instruments that improve on our natural endowments, and help us see new things, or the familar in new ways, with greater accuracy.

Similar progress is afoot in law, where the reliability of eye-witness testimony has over the recent decades come to be recognized as among the worst evidence, while technological marvels like DNA identification provide a whole new level of accuracy.

So, what about religion, the exemplary province still ruled by intuition? By coincidence, Steven Pinker wrote a strong plea in TNR recently for a truce between science and the humanities, including religion, to cooperate rather than hiding in mutual ignorance, hurling meaningless language such as "scientism". His point was not only that science has had important humanistic underpinnings and effects over the last several centuries, but that those humanities most vexed by "scientism", such as postmodernist philosophy and theology, have not had a lot of accomplishment to crow about themselves. They had better learn from other fields and take what is useful, rather than take obscurantist potshots.

In return, it is obvious that science and scientists need to be careful about what they have expertise in, and what values they and the humanities respectively bring to the table. But one important point here is that, under the cover of "hard" sciences and objectivity, science has made great strides in recognizing human cognitive limitations, both explicitly in the fields of psychology, and implicitly in the other sciences, whose whole modus operandi is built around the recognition of human weaknesses, which require constant vigilance, by open argument between competitively motivated scholars, by mathematical formulations where possible, by the discouting of authority, by careful and public documentation, and, most notoriously of all, by empirical experiment.

Have enough experiments been done to say whether prayers work? Have enough experiments been done to say whether god saves its chosen people, favors one team over another, or one nation, or one religion? Have enough experiments been done to indicate that religion has a deep psychological basis that belie its florid claims to objective truth?

Yes. We know all these things, and much more. For those viewing at home, the primary property of god is its "hidden-ness". For those rewinding and watching in depth and slow-motion, another primary property is the abundant anthropomorphic projections and wishes (and fears) attached to "Him". It is quite clear where all this comes from, and it isn't from telescopic observation.

Connected with this, we also know that we are fundamentally alone. While there may (or may not) be other intelligent beings in the universe, we know already that they won't be genetically or cognitively related to us, and will be so distant as to be fundamentally cut off from interacting with us. There is no one else to turn to.

Part of being existentially alone is having no outer standard of morals or other subjective values. We answer to no god or other being, we go to no Valhalla after death. Part of what we have learned is that for all the objective reality out there, the values and desires we have are our own, part of our subjective (and biological) makeup, in a constant dance with the wisdom (and desires) of those around us, and with those who have gone before and cultured our way through the world. This is the one place where intuitions really do rule supreme, since they make up our values by necessity ... there is nothing else to go by.

One can sense the discomfort of those yearning for something more certain to hang on to- a father totem to tell them what to think and how to feel. But, checking the instant replay, god is still dead and gone ... the movements of theology, postmodernsim, religious "discernment", and post-60's backlash are made up of people working out their own issues, groping in the dark without help from above. A key tipoff is their moralism. What is real or not is secondary to whether their communities live in a properly patriarchial moral order agreeable to them.

Incidentally, Steven Pinker discusses the fascinating issue of "explaining away", which is a common fear coming from the humanities. If we understand some interesting topic in a fully worked-out reductionistic sense, does that rob us of some aesthetic appreciation, of some of our humanity? Does music theory kill one's appreciation for Bach? Does knowing molecular biology kill one's appreciation for biology, or does instant replay destroy our appreciation for baseball? I don't think so.

What empiricism and science in general do "explain away" are ... bad explanations. There may be a certain charm in thinking that hurricanes are caused by immorality, birth defects by sins in a past life, that prophets received divine "revelations", or that god forms us in "His" image, (take note, females!), but we have to make do without such tales when we learn more about how things actually work. If you value "inspired" scriptures, mystical "forces", and folk theories about all and sundry, then yes, we lose something by this rationalistic, reductionistic, remorseless instant-replay process of enlightenement. And, frankly, good riddance.

• "Intellectually unsubtle"!, fumes Russ Douthat. Of all people.
• God still hanging around in some very small council chambers.
• Dawkins: evil, or just right?
• Why are attitudes about science shifting.. or are they?
• At least some fields (cougheconomics) could use another dose of empiricism.
• Malthus and modernity. Why does population outrun development in some countries, not others?
• Fannie and Freddie should be made entirely state run, not destroyed.
• The brotherhood's gamble.
• When will Egypt get a competent civilian government?
• Republicans... still the party sort of opposed to governing.
• On the values of leadership.
• We have to take nuclear seriously. After we get that carbon tax, of course.