futurehead

Poetry vs. prose in athletics (and elsewhere)

I participate in some Internet forums on running, and sometimes there is debate there over proper running form, with some participants resorting to physics and mathematics in order to make their point about the best running form.  I find such analysis to be not helpful in the least.  What *is* helpful is a good mental image.  For example, “run as if you’re running on wet paint” (the point being not to push off the ground with your feet but simply to lift them).  When swimming, “imagine that you are strapped to a backboard as if you’ve been in a car accident” (to keep your body straight in the water).  I find this in many sports – that attempts to actually accurately describe the motions that your body parts should follow, are not nearly as much help in achieving the form that the instructor feels is best, as a good cartoonish mental image.  When it comes to athletics, poetry is better than prose. 

Maybe that’s true more broadly as well.  If we look at the physics of our existence, it looks pretty unglamorous; on a physical level we appear to be nothing more than complex chemical reactions that have come about through some weird mathematical quirk (circular self-sustaining) in the universe.  Take an old philosophical question such as: do we have free will?  If you look at it closely, it’s pretty hard to see how we could.  Everything that is, everything we do is the result of everything that has happened before, in an unbreakable chain of causation (quantum indeterminacy or not!).

We’d all like to believe that we are morally responsible for our actions, in control of our selves.  But how do you explain all the people out there who go insane because they have a screw loose?  Are they morally flawed?  Is schizophrenia the result of bad choices?  C’mon.  Why do people improve when given lithium?  Why do people act crazy when given other drugs, from alcohol to LSD?  If these people do things because of chemicals in their brain, why are the rest of us any different?  We tend to put the extreme examples in a separate category, but why wouldn’t subtler effects be just as chemical in origin?  Why are some people grumpy, and others sweet?  Couldn’t such everyday differences be as much a difference of variations in brain chemistry, as the difference between a schizophrenic and a “well-adjusted” person?  Is a well-adjusted person that way in much the same way my bicycle is well-adjusted?  There is just too much evidence that people are the way they are because of their brain chemistry. 

Sure, experience and environment play a big role in how people are (though much of that, in turn, is stuff that happens to people, rather than anything we could even begin to think people have control over or choices about or free will concerning).  And chemical brain states can reflect, rather than cause, mental states.  But if take a murderer, for example, and try to break down the factors that led to their terrible act, it’s hard to see where “free will” enters the equation.

But on the other hand, who cares?  Like the physics of swimming, the physics of our existence is, at the level at which we live our lives, unhelpful.  The prose, the physics, is philosophy.  But it is poetry – meant broadly – that is the stuff of life:  to be or not to be; the path not taken, how do I love thee?

The problem with poetry, of course, is that it is a lot harder than in physics, to find grounds upon which different people can agree what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is not (though even in physics that ain't so easy as most people think). That just means you have to create your own life, there's no formula.

I’m sure this is a really trite and well-trodden line of thinking, but hey, I’ve just reached it myself, and it's my blog.

Colossal errors

It's always fun when entire bodies of supposed expert knowledge, fundamentals that are accepted by nearly everyone, are revealed to be wrong and/or unfounded.  My attention has been drawn to three strong examples of this phenomenon:

• Low-fat diet
• Shoes
• Economics

Once you internalize the fact that even mighty establishments, possessing the finest acronymed professional societies and mahogany-and-brass lobbies, all of whose members get plenty of respect at their local country clubs, can be totally full of shit, it is both liberating and, in a way, paralyzing.   I posted yesterday about how the Internet is having both of these effects in the medical arena.  And there are plenty of comical examples to be found of how this has been true in the past, with even the most highly and widely respected "experts" (doctors, scientists, philosophers, economists, etc).  Yet it's a lot harder when you are ensconced in *today's* discourses and claims of expertise and received wisdom.  It's like being trapped in amber -- it's a lot harder to assess the quality of the piece than when you're on the outside.

The shattering of received wisdom is liberating because it teaches you to question what other "common sense" might be way off track, and to grasp the contingency of our world -- just how broad the scope of possibilities are.  It could be true that our current understanding of economics is pretty good -- it could also be true that it's totally bogus, and we'd be better off with all kinds of radical changes (I strongly suspect the latter).  It frees you up to be practical and pragmatic, since you are no longer wedded to various notions of Truth, you can just more directly seek practical solutions for what's good policy.

On the other hand, the busting open of possibilities can be paralyzing. The more things in life that are open to question, the harder it can be to know what to do. 

Let's look a little closer at my three examples.

Low-fat diet

For a few decades it has been accepted medical wisdom that a high-fat diet is bad for you.  But the whole low-carb movement started by Atkins has challenged that wisdom, and pointed out that in fact, there really isn't actually any solid evidence that that is true.  They point out that shortly after you eat a bowl full of pasta, your body turns it into what is more or less the equivalent of a Snickers bar.  Even whole grains go through the same process, just a little more slowly.  And if you're not getting your calories from carbs (sugar, more or less), you basically gotta get them from fat.  As I mentioned in a recent post, it may be that it is not true that a calorie is a calorie, because fat calories make you feel fuller, while sugar calories do wacky things to your insulin system and can actually make you feel more hungry.  I notice this myself -- it is after a big pasta meal that I crave dessert the most.

To get a better explanation of this, and a fuller sense for just how wrong the conventional wisdom seems to be, read this excellent summation that ran a few years ago in the New York Times Magazine.

I was intellectually persuaded of the merit of these arguments by this and other pieces.  But (as the author of the piece himself alludes to) it is still hard to eat a high-fat diet without feeling that you are hurting yourself, while you don't feel that way at all eating pasta still.  This shows the power that these kinds of social understandings have over us and our tastes.

Shoes

It's all a big lie, man.  Just like gloves, safety goggles, and helmets, shoes are a useful piece of protective gear in some circumstances -- snow drifts, steel mills, and the like.  But overall, they just aren't that necessary, as a few brave pioneers willing to flout social convention have discovered, and I have confirmed for myself.  If I can run 15 miles on asphalt roads with my soles intact, then just when is it exactly that I need shoes?  As I have gone into, they are more of an irrational cultural holdover from  medievalistic, tribal, hierarchical, aristocratic, status-obsessed European historical cultures than a necessity of life.

Yet our society is pretty twisted when it comes to bare feet.  As barefooters.org points out,

consider a business near a beach. This business has barefooted customers all day long. Not only has nobody ever contracted any sort of illness from somebody else's bare feet, but nobody thinks anything of bare feet because it's "OK" to be barefoot near a beach. Now, transport this same business a few miles inland. Suddenly, without any change to the inside of the business, bare feet are an alleged health risk. Does this make sense?

(By the way, no state has any law prohibiting bare feet in any restaurant or other establishment. Or while driving.)  As the site points out, people don't usually mind flip-flops and sandals where the top of the foot is entirely visible -- it's the fact that someone lacks material on the bottom of their foot that bothers people. Again, what sense does that make?

It would be one thing if this was just a social custom that flouted hard evidence -- hardly an unknown.  But even the experts, as represented by foot doctors quoted in most articles about barefooting, appears to recoil at the idea of going barefoot.  I never see them address the substantial body of evidence that barefooting is far better for your feet.  Granted, it would be a hard sell for most doctors to instruct their patients to go barefoot full time, and a lot of patients would demand other remedies, and go to another doctor if they could not get them from their first.  But the best doctors think like scientists, in the full, rich sense of that term -- rational and evidence-guided, but also imaginative, intuitive, and brave enough to follow that evidence where it may lead.  They're not supposed to be petty-bourgeois shopkeepers, concerned about their customers and their market and their competition.  And they're not supposed to swallow holdover Elizabethan cultural biases and just pass them down to each new generation of doctors.  Even if patients resist the evidence, doctors could advise them to at least go barefoot as much as possible, and some do, but the profession does not seem to do this in general; instead they are actively steering people away from barefooting and toward baroque (if profitable) foot inserts and the like.  I wonder how many doctors have even investigated all the literature that is out there, and weighed it scientifically.

A pretty good article just came out in New York Magazine that also does a decent job of summarizing what's wrong with our conventional wisdom regarding shoes:  "You Walk Wrong: It took 4 million years of evolution to perfect the human foot.  But we're wrecking it with every step we take"

Economics

Oh man, I really hate economics.  I could write a post a day for a year on this subject, if I only had the time.  I will leave most of this subject for future posts, but suffice it to say here that while the field produces many useful and interesting intellectual tools, they never add up to a coherent body of knowledge; the very notion of homo economicus on which the field is based is a total myth; the very idea that a social science can be based upon physics as a role model is a giant anti-historicist error; the history of the field shows little evidence that economics is getting closer to the truth; and the field has an inborn conservative political bias and cultural effect even when practiced by liberals.

As markets implode, venerable companies fall to their knees, vast neighborhoods are reduced to ghost towns, and the national (world?) economy teeters, this is increasingly not a difficult case to make.  Over and again throughout history, economists and the conventional wisdom they impart have been proven to be colossally in error.  Examples include:

• The mercantilists, who viewed the economic arena as a zero-sum battle for power among nation states, and wealth as more important than production
• The Physiocrats, who in the 18th century regarded agriculture as the only basis of wealth.  The industrial revolution kinda showed otherwise
• The Classical Economists, who advocated the hands-off approach that led to and was discredited by the Great Depression
• The Keynesians, who thought they'd figured everything out, until they were discredited by the (supposedly theoretically impossible) combination of high inflation, slow growth and high unemployment ("stagflation") in the early 1970s
• The post-Reagan free marketeers, the cock-sure ideologues of our own era, having explained away the Great Depression and much else, seek to move back towards pure Classical Economics (which never really existed).  While the intellectual descendants of the Keynesians have become more humble epistemologically, the Free Marketeers think they have the Answers, and their viewpoint dominates our culture.  We may be witnessing the wheels come off this latest economic blind alley at this very moment.

Who will be next? 

What these error-ridden subject areas have in common is that:

• They are irredeemably complex -- there are just too many variables to be susceptible to reductionist analysis
• They are heavily burdened by thick cultural baggage
• They result from stunning failures of epistemological humility. I remember asking proponents of Bush's Iraq War before he started it, "where are the nukes?" If Saddam has them, let's see them before we invade -- by which I meant, let's be sure they exist.   Why don't dietitians ask themselves, "where's the evidence a high-fat diet is bad?  Why don't foot doctors recognize just how little we know about sports medicine?  Why don't economists recognize the historical nature of their discipline?

The Internet and Doctors

One of the great things about the Internet is how it has changed being a patient.  If you are at all like me and prone to thorough researching of any medical ailment that hits, you know that the Internet has had big effects on how we relate to our doctors:

• When I go in to see a specialist I am usually quite up to speed on the basics of my condition, the parameters of possibilities for what the diagnosis might be, and how the body part in question functions.  (See this New Yorker cartoon.)
• One problem is how to convey to the doctor how much you know so you don't both waste time.  Some doctors don't want to hear how much you know, because they are afraid it will revealed them as naked of an special insight or expertise.  The best ones quickly jump onto your wavelength and get into the more advanced topics.
• You also often encounter alternate medical theories, which can sow doubt in the doctor standing before you with his conventional outlook. The Internet amplifies dissenting voices, so that conventional wisdom can be more easily knocked off its pedestal. If not digested with a very critical eye, this can easily fill your head up with junk.  You could see how doctors could find that annoying. 
  
• At the same time though, often the conventional wisdom is wrong (and/or unfounded!). Internet research often throws into stark relief just how sharp are the limits of medical knowledge in many areas, which can also lead to a morass of ambiguity and doubt.  The dirty secret of medicine is that a huge amount of what doctors are running around telling people is not actually based on research.  When you lose faith in doctors, you lose the comfort of having a confident person in a white coat who knows all the answers tell you what your problem is and exactly what to do. I find that I have a lot less patience now for Voice of God doctors who can't handle being knocked out of the role of infallible expert.  Often when I see a specialist what I'm looking for is a consultant, who can reality-check and narrow my own self-diagnosis.  Someone who is secure enough to be upfront about what she knows and doesn't know.  I know too much to be comforted by the white-coat role, it's just annoying.
• But the Internet also collapses statistical differences.  What I mean is that there may be a symptom you have, and one possible cause is something benign, while another cause is some devastating horrible fatal disease.  Your doctor knows that he sees people 4 times a week complaining of that symptom, and only once every few years is it caused by the fatal disease.  But online you rarely get that "feel for frequency," which is one of the things a real live doctor can get you.  The fatal disease might loom nearly as large in the online discourse as the everyday cause, and even though you may read that the symptom is "usually the result" of the benign condition, that message gets contradicted by what you read. 
• Another irreplaceable thing live doctors offer is not just a feel for frequency, but also the ability to feel, period -- to assess the nature of a lump or some part of your innards and through their experience and their feel for things, determine things about your condition.  This is what Michael Polanyi called "tacit knowledge", and you can't put that on the Internet. 

The 4 Great Pleasures of Life

I have always thought of there being three great pleasures in life.  But since I started doing triathlons I have added a fourth. In no particular order:

• Food
• Sex
• Music
• Exercise

Of course there are other pleasures in life, which can far exceed any of these -- such as love, parenthood, family, fellowship, problem solving, game playing, creativity, and the pleasure of intellectual discovery and debate.  I'm talking here just about the sensory pleasures.

A couple of other points about exercise:

• Exercise is definitely a little more subtle pleasure in some ways, in that it can actually be painful -- at least at first -- but you do find that your body craves it and that you look back on excellent runs and rides and so forth with a strongly pleasurable feeling. As they say, there's a fine line between pleasure and pain -- after all, eating spicy food can be painful too, yet I have found myself addicted to fresh habanero & jalapeno peppers (once you begin eating them you find yourself adding them to nearly everything).

• Anyway, I'm not talking about "runner's high."  I often feel totally exuberant upon finding myself alive, out on a beautiful strip of pavement or a nice running trail on a beautiful morning, with good company, starting out on a long ride or run. But that's usually at the start of the run/ride.  I don't think I've ever really felt high, in the way some people describe.  It's more of a softer, subtler pleasure, the kind that you hardly notice at the time, but which suffuses your memory of the outing and keeps you wanting to go back from more.  Right now, recovering from an injury, I miss my long runs very badly.
  

• For me the pleasure of exercise is not just the kind of brain-chemical good feeling, either.  When you have been injured, or when you think about how many people there are out there with disabilities, there is a joy that comes just in feeling your own movement, your own strength, the elegance of your body's coordination, working like a well-oiled machine (this is on a good day; other times you feel like you're 95 years old).  When you think about the number of things that can go wrong in the human body it just feels great to know that, for the moment (until inevitably, one way or another, sooner or later, you fall apart) your body is capable of such motion.
  

• The sensation applies to swimming and biking, but running brings it out most strongly.  I wonder if that has something to do with the theory that humans actually evolved as distance runners.

• It seems as though the pleasures can augment one another.  For example, exercise makes you enjoy food more, while music can make you enjoy running more (I'll leave it to you the reader to complete this train of thought).

LOOKING at my list, I realize it covers 4 of the five senses: smell, taste, touch, and hearing.  That leaves sight.  So, some might argue that I've left out art, visual art.  I appreciate a pretty or interesting image. but it just does not seem to rank as highly when it comes to purely sensory, animal, bodily pleasures. Maybe if I were more interested in art or artistically inclined I would disagree; maybe I'm really missing a whole dimension of human experience.  But that's how it seems to me.  Except insofar as sight is connected to sex, as in appreciation of a beautiful woman, it's just more of a practical sense, for me at least.

I just thought of something -- check out this album cover, it manages to hit 3 of the pleasures in one blow:

IF only she was on a treadmill or something, it would cover all 4.  (Or maybe it does -- do you think she's doing squats?  Maybe yoga.)  I remember looking at this cover when I was a kid (and listening to it; the best track on the album is "Bittersweet Samba" IMHO).  Probably had some profound effect on my psycho-sexual development.  Or maybe it's just been lying dormant all these years deep in my brain waiting to come out in the form of some crackpot blog entry about food sex and music. 

How to Lose Weight

Here is a distillation of my own experience & observations on how to drop pounds.  I make no more claims than that this has generally worked for me.

• Get over the hump on exercise.  When you haven't been exercising, it's painful and hateful and heinous.  But, after you do it steadily for awhile (a week or two perhaps) you "get over the hump" and suddenly one day you find that if you skip your workout, you miss it and crave it.  That starts off a virtuous circle whereby you enjoy exercise and therefore do it regularly and therefore enjoy it, etc.
  
• Figure out an exercise routine that is convenient.  The key is for it to be convenient enough that you'll actually do it regularly so that you *do* get over that hump.  If it's too sporadic, it will remain unpleasant.  By far the easiest thing to do is open your front door and go running out it, turn around however many miles later, and run back home.  Or bike to work, or find a pool or gym that's convenient enough that you can actually fit it into your daily routine.  But the more logistical baloney you have to go through to get going (getting in car, driving to gym, etc), the less you'll do it, especially in the period before you get over the hump. 
• Find a rich source of exercise.  Don't let it just be exercise alone for no other purpose but exercise.  Make it a social occasion, or a beautiful run in the outdoors that you find renewing and enjoyable, or something competitive that inspires you -- figure out something that has multiple positive dimensions that make it a rich and enjoyable part of your life and not a joyless chore. 
• Exercise without expectations.  Once you begin exercising regularly, you may well find to your amazement that despite all your hard work you do *not* automatically start shedding pounds.  Don't be discouraged or surprised; you are in this for the long haul and you should begin your new exercise habit without expectations.  The point now is to learn to enjoy the exercise and get good at it (and of course, you will be doing yourself a lot of good that isn't reflected by the reading on the scale yet).
• Eat low carbs for a few weeks.   After you've been exercising for a while, try cutting out most carbs from your diet for a couple weeks.  Personally I don't usually go much longer than that, but when I do it typically bumps my weight down by 5-8 pounds -- and then, thanks to my continuing exercise, it usually stays there. There's big debate over the low-carb approach but the anecdotal evidence for its effectiveness is overwhelming, and my own experience backs that up.  By cutting carbs and getting your calories from fat instead you can lose more pounds with less suffering than you might expect. 
  
  • The secret is that fat calories make you feel much fuller than the same amount of carb calories, which actually make you feel *more* hungry often for reasons that some theorize have to do with insulin cycles and the like. 
  • Kind of like with exercise, once you get over an initial "hump" of unpleasantness you will be amazed how you cease to crave a lot of foods. 
• Keep food out of your visual field.  Eating is an animal function and we are of course at root animals.  I find that when food enters my visual field, I (pretty much automatically and unstoppably) eat it.  So, when I get to work I put my apple behind my monitor until lunch so it doesn't call out to me constantly as I work.

Now that I've expanded my writing into the diet field, I may have to tackle romance novels next. . .

The Mystery of the Nice Nazi

Having lived in Washington for 15 years, I have reached a gradual realization:  there is zero correlation between people's politics and their personalities.  To put it in more partisan terms, there's no relationship between how good or cruel people are to the those who directly surround them, and how good or cruel people are through the policies they support or order.  A man like Ronald Reagan, for example, was by all accounts extremely genial and warm to those who met him.  At the same time, he was quite cruel to the poor and others in the policies he supported.  On the other hand, a man like Ralph Nader has done a lot of good in the policies that he advocates, but in person is reputedly (according to some media reports as well as people I know who have worked with him directly) not such a nice character. 

You meet a lot of people of different political views here in D.C. (and unlike much of the rest of the country, people actually like to talk about their political views here), and it's inescapable that, despite the fact that today's conservatives support policies with evil effects (such as the unnecessary Iraq war, and appalling policies toward low-wage workers and the poor, the environment, and so on) many of them are excellent people up close. 

Like many, many people before me, I found myself a little disoriented, how could someone who is such a great person up close be so terrible in the policies they support?

This might seem obvious to an apolitical person but people who are highly politicized have a lot of trouble with this fact of there being no correlation.  It blows people's minds.  People expect that when they see a conservative politician on TV who is genial, that he must therefore be good in his policies too.  If he does not seem like someone they'd like to hang out with in a bar, they decide they can't trust him to run the country. 

I've decided that there are 2 basic explanations for this lack of correlation between cruelty of politics and cruelty of the person:

1. Imagination

Part of the answer lies in the fact that since politics involves mass activities beyond our immediate purview and experience, it requires abstract, theoretical thought, and therefore it is an exercise in imagination.  Since we humans are an imaginative breed, we construct all kinds of worlds to inhabit.  Although most of us are relatively consistent in our perceptions of the walls, floors and furniture that makes up our immediate surroundings, we go off in all kinds of crazy directions once we have to think about things outside our visual field, including wacky constructs like Libertarianism, Scientology, Free Silverism, fascism, Maoism, and everybody else's religion except yours.  It's not just Star Trekkies and Harry Potter-reading kids who are running around half-living in highly imagined worlds far removed from our everyday experience, it's kindof all of us.

When my dog is made to suffer, she does not ask the question, "Why am I suffering like this?  Whose fault is this?"  And then build up a store of hatred against those targets.  Her suffering is immediate, and once the immediate cause of her predicament is out of her sight, she accepts that suffering as just part of the universe.  She may lash out at the sources of her pain if she can, and avoid them in the future, but she does not sit around stewing and blaming the Jews, or what have you.  She lacks the imagination.  Yet we humans do.  Our imagination allows us channel our animalistic feelings into very abstract targets for blame -- in which process all kinds of unreliabilities can be introduced, to put it mildly.  So people end up being slaughtered in large numbers for identifying with the wrong catechism, the wrong form of the dialectic, the wrong branch of some ancient family tree, or for otherwise stumbling into a walk-on part as bad guy in somebody's imagined story of who or what done him wrong, or the world wrong. 

And there is no political view that does not involve the imagination, so while some of us may be more off-track than others, none of us can be sure we're perceiving the world correctly.  And who knows what factors contribute to the particular imaginative visions that each of us embraces?  They certainly bear no correlation to other personal factors. 

2. Compartmentalization

But "The Mystery of the Nice Fascist" as Nancy Drew might call it goes even deeper than the multiplicity and unreliability of the human imagination.  Humans are really compartmentalized.  Like many people I started out with a childlike notion of "evil" as some kind of core condition of the soul.  But the more of human life I'm exposed to, the more convinced I have become that people can be really terrible in one area of life, while basically decent in most others.  Serial killers are good husbands and patriots and colleagues.  Good fireman and policemen who risk their lives and sacrifice much for their communities, also beat their wives or molest children or embezzle money from their churches.

I recently connected this line of thought with another that I have always found fascinating: the artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky's theory of The Society of Mind, which posits that, in brief, our brain is made up of individual compartments (he calls them "agents," but I like to think of them as little animals) that work together to make up our mind.  So crowded together in your mind is an agent that tells you when to eat, a separate agent that navigates you to the restaurant, an agent that governs the coordination you require to shift gears in your car, and the agent that nags you to visit the restroom when you arrive (sometimes on the edge of your consciousness, like a dog begging to be let out), even as another agent dominates your conscious thoughts with a relationship problem the whole time.  Maybe it's just a more sophisticated version of the angel and devil selves that compete for a character's mind in cartoons.  Perhaps the most obvious case is sexuality -- think about all the things we hear about so many people doing when driven by their inner sexual animal that are so much at odds with other parts of their lives. Another case is our ideological selves (to connect this point with my first one):  people can be driven by crazy imaginative visions that have zero correlation with their other qualities. (See also my related post on multiple personalities.)

Evil actions vs. evil people

The commonplace notion is that anyone who is evil in one area, must be someone evil in some "deep" way.  No "good" person would commit sex crimes or beat their wife or betray their country or cross a picket line or support Nazis or communists or terrorists or Democrats or Republicans or whatever is regarded as most evil in the context at hand.  They must somehow be twisted down to the core. 

But clearly this childish notion is not true.  Since Freud it has been recognized that the unitary, self-transparent self is a myth.  But the myth dies hard.  But this is why enlightened people and societies try to have compassion for people who do evil things, and while taking action when necessary to protect society from further bad things, avoiding demonization, harsh draconian punishments and a purely punitive approach to justice.  This may also be the insight behind the Christian idea of hating the sin but not the sinner. 

Leadership, faith, risky business

Despite what you might think from my title, this post is not about the dangers of mixing faith and politics – in a certain way, it's the opposite. 

Actually it's about leadership.  As I wrote the other day, one of the reasons why I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic presidential nominee is what appears to be her conventional, calculating, risk-averting approach to leadership.

The flaw with this style of leadership is that it leads to inauthentic and ultimately weak leadership. It consists of making a constant stream of minor (and sometimes not-so-minor) corrections to one's path and oneself, each to avoid a short-term political hit.  Like retouching a photograph, each alteration taken individually seems to improve the photo – but when you add them all together you end up with a picture that looks fake.  In the long term, you can be better off plowing ahead, taking the hits on individual issues, and gaining a greater big-picture respect from your audience. 

Many of today’s Democrats end up looking as genuine as a patient after their 10th facelift.  The larger problem is that today’s political system requires such a ridiculous level of effort and commitment that the people it attracts, and creates, are simply afraid to take hits.  Here are some quotes I think they might want to ponder: (think of death here as a metaphor meaning “political death” or “death of your career”)

If you want to become whole
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.
        - Lao Tsu, Tao te Ching (trans. Mitchell), 22

When a man thus loses himself he immediately finds himself in the service of all that lives
        - Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, Chapter 2, #52

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it.
        - Jesus Christ, Mark 8:35

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what
ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body,
what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the
body than raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they
reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth
them. Are ye not much better than they? . . . .
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall
take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day
is the evil thereof.
        - Jesus Christ, Matthew 6:25-34

Sometimes you just gotta say, “What the fuck”
        - Joel Goodson (Tom Cruise), Risky Business (1983)

What is this thing that our leaders seem to lack, this ability to say "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" (attrib. Adm. David Farragut during U.S. Civil War).  One term for it may (ironically given the religiosity of our public figures these days) be "faith," which (among its many shades of meaning) refers to the willful confidence that things will just work out. 

I suspect that one of the things that promotes this "faith," this ability to keep to a steady path in the face of danger, is having one's eyes on a prize, a goal, a mission, a larger purpose that subsumes the dangers at hand.  Maybe the problem with the preponderance of today's Democrats is the fact that they have lost their way in the battle of ideas, are floundering in terms of what they believe they should push for, and have no clear goals about which they care more than their own careers.

Along those lines, two more excellent quotes:

It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then, finally, you exploit the system – your connections in it, and your understanding of it – for personal profit.
           - Michael Kinsley [Washington Post, Dec. 2, 2005]

It never ceases to amaze me how many people I meet are willing to risk their lives for their country – but not their careers.
            - A guy I once heard at an intelligence conference who
              was high up in the CIA for many years (paraphrase)

High seas or calm waters?

I mentioned yesterday in my posting on how unchanging sensations fade away how barefooting opens up an entire new world of sensation.  A legitimate question to ask is, “is that a good thing?” 

That’s a much more loaded question than it might seem at first blush, I think.

It’s true, when you’re running or walking barefoot, sometimes the sensations are pleasurable, sometimes they’re uncomfortable, once in a while they’re painful, usually they’re neutral.  But overall, it's cool to feel the world in a way that, biologically, we may well be programmed to.  It reminds me of Oliver Sacks’s great book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which had a chapter (#18) about a guy who all of a sudden found that he had a totally intense sense of smell, like a dog.  He could walk into a room and recognize, before seeing them, the 20 people who had been there before.  He could smell people’s emotions – fear, happiness, sexual arousal – and easily find his way around New York by smell alone. 

Smell pleasure was intense – smell displeasure too – but it seemed to him less a world of mere pleasure and displeasure than a whole aesthetic, a whole judgment, a whole new significance, which surrounded him. (p. 157)

Maybe barefooting is kind of like that.  One thing Sacks writes that is not so favorable about this comparison, is that when the guy was experiencing the world like a dog, he felt that the overwhelming sensory world that he was part of was actually crowding out his higher faculties of abstract reasoning and so forth.  But I suspect barefooting is a far, far milder version of our primordial sensory possibilities than what this guy got a glimpse of.  After a few weeks the experience suddenly ended for him.  Sacks speculates that what happened was that an entire layer of our sensory experience, which has been pushed to the back of human consciousness by higher functions, temporarily came back to the fore for this man. 

So are we better off exposing ourselves to the pleasures and the pains of barefoot sensation, or keeping our feet inside shoes where all sensation quickly fades?

Seems to me this question gets to the differences between two entire approaches to life.  The Romantic viewpoint is that “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” (that’s Tennyson, the Internet tells me).  That without sensation and deep feelings and experiences, even if that means deep pain, you are simply not living.  The other point of view, which I no doubt simplistically think of as Asian (Buddhist, Taoist??), is that we should above all seek equanimity.  The Tao Te Ching says that  "What the master desires is non-desire."

I’ve always suspected that the pleasure centers of our brains are constructed in such a way that the amount of pleasure and the amount of pain we feel roughly balances out – that pleasure is like a wave in a pond:  by attaining pleasure you gather the water up into a wave that will crest above the baseline – but that also simultaneously creates troughs that bring you below it.  I wonder if this is why drug addiction, along with the intense pleasures it brings (the high from heroin is supposedly akin to an hours-long orgasm) brings so much misery.  Why people whose lives are difficult and dreary find outlet in ecstatic religious ceremonies.  Why teenagers who discover exciting new worlds with their peers become sullen and miserable at home.  Why monks find contentment through self-flagellation.  Why, I sometimes speculate, running and other tough athletic workouts raise your happiness level because they put you through painful experiences in a controlled and healthy way – driving out the pain intensely and leaving you with a gentle pleasure that suffuses the rest of your hours. 

Western culture is based upon the romantic idea of seeking the high crests of waves, even though that may necessitate equally low troughs. For example, the cult of romantic love that emerged in the middle ages, is a socially constructed way of repressing sexual and romantic entanglements in order to build up desire to tremendous heights, until its attainment becomes a hugely joyous happening – but when thwarted or ruined, brings great sadness. ("If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it” – Hemingway.)  Someone else I once read pointed out that the problem with the ideal of romantic love and “following one’s heart,” is that as soon as your heart changes course, if you take that seriously, why wouldn't you follow that heart right back out the door?  Which leads to (let us settle upon a term that does not beg our question here) rocky relationships.

Advertising – in fact, arguably our whole post-Calvinist economy – is also based on urging people to seek peak sensations.

Many traditional non-European cultures, on the other hand, are based on arranged marriages where romantic love plays little role.  Whether romantic love is a “natural” and omnipresent phenomenon in human cultures, as we westerners find it hard not to believe, I simply do not know.  But either way it seems clear to me that it can be culturally built up and intensified and shaped into the center of personal and public life, or culturally treated as an anti-social nuisance that mature people resist and overcome just as they are expected to resist other anti-social sexual urges such as groping the chief’s wife.

Buddhism is all about extinguishing desire, not carefully cultivating it, by my understanding. 

I argued yesterday that happiness and unhappiness are very relative, and basically define each other: unhappiness is the absence of happiness, and vice versa.  The Ying and the Yang, inseparable.  I guess what I’m speculating about here is whether there is not also a brain-chemical dimension to this – that every high brings a hangover, of one kind or another.  On the other hand, I also speculated yesterday that the overall arc of one’s life could mean greater or lesser happiness, and obviously human life is exceedingly complicated and some people are way more happy than others for a million reasons.  But still, trying to grasp some basic underlying dynamics here. 

So what’s the path to a happy life?  Does one seek sensations, even though that might guarantee a dose of pain/unhappiness along with the pleasure/happiness?  Or is the wise course to seek the equanimity of calm seas?  I haven’t the foggiest idea.  I make no pretense to knowing whether one or the other orientation might be generally better.  We have to find our own paths.  And, in our own footwear.

Fading sensations

I read a fascinating article (pdf, 863k) in the August 2007 Scientific American that has implications that seem broader and broader the more I reflect on them.  According to the two neurophysiologists who authored the piece, when it comes to our eyes, constant input fades away – as they put it, "an unchanging stimulus leads to neural adaptation in which visual neurons adjust their output such that they gradually stop responding." In other words, because of the wet chemistry of our retinal light sensing cells, unchanging stimulation ceases to produce a reaction. Since unchanging objects do not generally pose a threat, the article explains, "animal nervous systems have evolved to detect changes in the environment." Frogs, it turns out, are an "extreme case" of this because things not moving are actually invisible to them (the dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park were supposed to be the same way; I was always curious about the basis for that.)

The reason our eyes are constantly in motion, jerking around with tiny little hops (called saccades and microsaccades) even when we think we're staring at a fixed point, is that human eyes create their own motion so that our visual field isn't constantly fading.

To prove to yourself that this neural fading (called the Troxler Effect) is real, check out this optical illusion (there's also an interactive version, and another illusion based on the same principle and just a whole bunch of cool optical illusions in general).

In the lab they can completely halt these microscopic eye motions, and they have found that your entire field of vision then fades away. In fact, if it were not for this effect, you would constantly see blood vessels in your eyes (which move with your eyes & therefore are faded).

(I wonder if this is in some way analogous to what takes place with video compression.  As I understand it, most compression algorithms work by recording only those portions of each frame that are different from the preceding. So those parts of the image that are unchanging are effectively ignored – just like with our vision. I wonder if our cells evolved this way not just because of the adaptive advantages of identifying motion as the authors mention, but also because there are processing efficiencies involved for the computation performed by the brain (note that according to the authors, the fading effect takes place at the level of the neuron, not at the processing level of the brain, where other "fadeouts" – for example, someone nagging you – must occur.)

But for me the most exciting point of the article, an aside which made it leap out as something of broader interest and relevance than just an ocular biological quirk, is that:

Neural adaptation takes place in all the senses, including touch.  For instance, you may feel your shoes when you first put them on in the morning, but the feeling goes away after a while.  You probably do not want to be aware of your shoes 16 hours a day, after all.  If you wiggle your toes, however, you can feel your shoes again. Similarly, fixational eye movements constantly "wiggle" the images on the retina so that your vision never goes away.

That just makes sense in a ton of ways.  It explains why smells fade, why you can't tell what your living room smells like, why you taste a glass of wine most vividly with the first sip, and by the last, it's pretty much just wine (or is it just me?).  It explains why you can enjoy food more if you alternate bites of two dishes, or eat food (even a sandwich) that is made up of mixes of different foods so that all the bites are constantly changing mixes of ingredients.  And many other things. It was just a major "aha" for me.

Also, as a barefooter I cannot resist pointing out the personal aptness of the example the authors chose to use above: the loss of sensation that comes from wearing shoes.  When we go shoeless every step brings fresh sensations.  Combined with the fact that, as a doctor friend tells me, our feet have more nerve endings than any other part of our body except for our hands and our sex organs, this helps explain why barefooting opens up an entire new world of sensation that is otherwise deadened and closed off to us. (Update: see this post on world of barefoot sensation)

This neural adaptation also represents a danger for athletes, however.  Every runner knows that when you are feeling pain, it will usually fade if you just keep running.  Often, "running through" pain, as it's called, is an excellent thing, keeping various harmless aches and pains that we all experience from immobilizing us.  But in some cases, it can be a dangerous clouding of urgent bodily signals that we are doing mounting damage to our bodies, as with tendonitis or a bone fracture.

Perhaps not just bodily pain but also psychic pain also fades with time – the pain of grief, of regret, of guilt, of embarrassment or humiliation.  Maybe if such pain doesn't fade away it is because there there are psychological "microsaccades" that keep the pain fresh.

Also, pleasure.  Even the finest delicacy, if eaten too frequently, begins to fade in the pleasure it gives.  How does the rich person, who can eat at the finest restaurants every night, ever derive the pleasure from the experience that a poorer person, who can only do so rarely, will?  How does one "wiggle" one's happiness?  Perhaps we can think of pleasurable activities that involve wiggling of one kind or another, but this line of thinking confirms what I've always believed about happiness, which is that it is immensely relative.  It's always seemed to me that people are happy when things are getting better for them, and unhappy when things are getting worse, and when things stay the same, people's satisfaction level floats back to an even keel or personal default psychological state.  (Complicating this is the issue of expectations, which is what defines improvement or decline for people.) 

This implies that the happiest person is he or she who starts off life in very dire circumstances and whose life steadily improves over its course.  The unhappiest person would be the person whose life follows the reverse course.  People whose circumstances remain the same – whether they are born in a shack or in a mansion, would be predicted to experience roughly equal levels of happiness.

Just as with neural adaptation, it is movement that produces sensation, whether good or bad.

Of course, that's assuming a certain baseline level of physical comfort, I imagine.  While the person who sleeps on a rough floor will probably get used to it (sensory adaptation again) and be none the less happy for it, hunger and disease are not likely to be subject to the effect.

I previously posted on the ancient Greek thinker Democritus, who said:

you should consider the lives of those in distress, reflecting on their intense sufferings, in order that your own possessions and condition may seem great and enviable, and you may, by ceasing to desire more, cease to suffer in your soul. . . . If you keep to this way of thinking, you will live more serenely, and will expel those not-negligible curses in life — envy, jealousy and spite.

In light of the Scientific American article, Democritus's advice to reflect upon the worse circumstances of others now sounds to me like a form of psychological saccade or "wiggling" that will improve your own happiness by making your soft plush bed and other luxuries and attainments seem fresh once again.  The same effect could be achieved by reflecting on how much better your life is than it once was.  And envy and jealousy – as well as regret – mean imagining your life as better than it is, which is psychologically the same as experiencing a downward movement in your circumstances, which results in unhappiness. 

Finding the smooth path

I have a really stiff aluminum frame on my bike, so when I go over bumps its really uncomfortable.  Much more than the old flexible steel-framed bikes, or the newfangled expensive carbon-fiber frames.  So I’m always looking for smooth paths – especially on my way to work & back, where there is a lot of poorly maintained pavement. 

There’s one spot along the route (the Route 50 service road in Arlington) where the pavement is especially bad. This winter, I started riding home after dark, and riding through this patch, when I couldn’t actually see the pavement clearly*, I discovered that by curving off to the right through this patch, I got a much smoother ride.  I discovered this in the dark, when I couldn’t actually see the pavement; in the daylight, the whole width of the road looks equally horrendous, and if I wasn’t riding in the dark, I never would have discovered that there was actually a path through the road that, while it looked just as cracked and torn up as the rest, was actually far smoother on the tires.  Ironically, by being in a sense blinded, I actually discovered far more about the road.

This is a perfect metaphor for some really deep things in life.  (Of course you can work out what they are on your own, what fun would it be for me to spell them out?)

(*BTW when I ride at night I use lights – a lot of them, I’m lit up like a Christmas tree actually – but mostly to be seen; this spot is nearly the only one on my route where surrounding streetlights don’t provide enough light for me to see the road clearly).

The culture of shoes & politics of bare feet

What do shoes really protect us from?

Since I started running barefoot two years ago, I’ve really enjoyed it and find myself more and more reluctant to put on shoes, and itching to kick them off when I am wearing them.  This has led me to do some thinking about why we wear shoes.  Plainly, if I can run miles (16 is what I've worked up to so far) on asphault in bare feet with nary a blister, as I do regularly (and many others regularly run marathons), then, in the vast majority of situations, I don’t really need to wear shoes for safety reasons in the course of daily life, except for cold weather & a few other special situations, just as I don’t need gloves most of the time.

The real thing that forces me to wear shoes most of the time of course is social pressure and conformity.  It seems clearer than ever to me that shoes are for the most part nothing more than a fashion item, required by custom not nature.  Fashion is of course by its very nature utterly irrational and tribalistic, and has at best a distant relationship to practical functionality. 

Once you realize this about shoes, and begin to discover how enjoyable it is to go without them, they begin to annoy you a lot more than they ever did before. 

The fact is, our Western society, despite its supposed rationality and scientific enlightenment, has a lot of arbitrary, tribal rules that are not really questioned by most people.  For example, when engaged in many activities you must display a phallic strip of cloth hanging from your neck as a sign of respect if you are male.  To get into some restaurants, or attend other formal occasions, you have to wear a coat, or a suit or other clothing that was well adapted to northern Europe in the 17th century -- even when you're in, say, Miami in the 21st century.

Shoes, it seems clear, have a specially enduring social function of demonstrating social rank, and more specifically an absence of poverty. Shoes demonstrate that you are not among the poorest group in society.  Even though that group (which was once a majority) barely exists any more, this became deeply ingrained in European culture over the course of recent centuries, and although we are barely conscious of it, this cultural bias has come down to us, and that is the reason that it remains embarrassing for most of us to appear in all but the most casual situations without footwear. 

Of course, people often suffer greatly to show their superiority.  I came across a good example of this kind of irrationality:  the British planters who lived in Jamaica, Barbados and other Caribbean islands during the 1600s.  They

tried their best to transfer English modes of diet, dress, and housing to the tropics.  Scorning to imitate the Spaniards, the Indians, or the Negroes, who were all experienced at living in hot countries, they clung determinedly to their own North European styles and standards.  (Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves [1972], p. 263)

The English wore linen when they could afford it, but “much of their clothing was woolen and worsted.”  For military infantry drills, for example, the white men of the islands were issued red coats and black hats.   

What idiots!  Parading around in the Barbados in woolen coats, just because that was what people were wearing up in London and Amsterdam?

Dunn explains,

The Caribbean planters, like all Europeans in the seventeenth century, conceived of food and clothing in hierarchical terms.  Each rank in the social order, from aristocrats at the top to beggars at the bottom, had its own distinct style of dress, diet, and habitation.  (p. 263)

When it came to clothes in particular,

The clothes a man wore in the status-conscious seventeenth century identified his social position more readily than the food he ate.  Every occupation had its own designated wardrobe.  The rich took care to dress richly, and the poor were expected to dress poorly. (p. 282)

According to Dunn:  “very rarely did field Negroes wear hats or shoes” (and overall “wore little clothing”) while the next people up the ladder, white servants, “generally used shoes and stockings.”  (pp. 283-84) In fact,

Unencumbered by layers of sweat-drenched clothing, the slaves probably kept cleaner than the white servants, and since they liked to wash more than Englishmen thought necessary in the seventeenth century, they very likely kept cleaner than their white masters.  Dr. Sloane remarked on their odd habit of bathing “in fair water every day.” (p. 284)

It’s easy to laugh at these rigid Brits walking around in wool coats in Barbados and Jamaica, trying to maintain the standards and propriety of a culture and couture that was adapted to foggy London town.  But face it:  we’re just as stupid today, walking around in suits in Washington, DC in August, and wearing shoes all the time, turning our feet unnaturally white, soft and flabby even as we pad around carpeted office buildings, mostly clean smooth streets and other environments that, I can tell you from personal experience, are much easier on the feet than any stick-strewn forest, pebbly field or other “natural” surface. 

Unlike many fashion impositions that are just burdensome and annoying, shoes are probably actively unhealthy (most foot problems are caused by shoes, experts say).

An irrational custom that is annoying, uncomfortable and unhealthy is bad enough.  It's worse when it's a way to say, “I’m better than you” (or maybe “I’m no worse than you”).  Let's face it, a suit and tie certainly serves no other purpose.  Although shoes have become standard enough now that they alone do not denote status, their absence still screams, “I’m poor and desperate!”

Check out this passage from Adam Smith in his 1776 Wealth of Nations.  In making a distinction between necessities and luxuries, he writes that

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about barefooted. In France they are necessaries neither to men nor to women, the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes, and sometimes barefooted. Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. All other things I call luxuries, without meaning by this appellation to throw the smallest degree of reproach upon the temperate use of them. Beer and ale, for example, in Great Britain, and wine, even in the wine countries, I call luxuries. A man of any rank may, without any reproach, abstain totally from tasting such liquors. Nature does not render them necessary for the support of life, and custom nowhere renders it indecent to live without them.  [Book five, Chapter II, Part 2, Article IV]

This offhand cultural report from his day sheds a lot of light on the origins of our attitude towards shoes today:

• Notice Smith’s report that in the 18th century, it was common for the "lowest rank" in France (and in 18th century France, that was a big group) to “walk about barefooted.” 
• Notice how Smith, who probably lived among a lot more barefoot people than anyone today, puts shoes squarely in the category of custom.  He makes no suggestion that they might actually be necessary –- instead, with no discussion of the matter, as though none of his contemporary readers would disagree, he groups them with the fashions of clothing, and specifically NOT in the category of things that nature renders “necessary for the support of life.”
• Smith says that the lack of shoes in England denotes “that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.”  Here Smith is reflecting the old view that financial success was a mirror of moral rectitude – that good morals would lead to financial success, and that poverty was an indicator of poor character.  This view was held through the 19th century (and perhaps continues to hold some sway in some circles today).   If you're barefoot, you're not only poor, but you're of low character and morals too (or why else would you be poor?)  It’s important to keep this view in mind in order to recover the full extent of the disgraceful cultural associations that bare feet carry, which have come down to us to this day.
  

Perhaps at some point in the future we will outgrow this obsession with unnecessary footwear, and most people will begin going barefoot most of the time.  I have a vision of people in the future watching our science fiction movies of today, and laughing because in our portrayals of the future, we quaintly show everyone wearing shoes.  (As if Thomas Jefferson had made a movie about the 20th century, and showed everyone wearing powdered wigs.  Or like 1950s science fiction, where the characters are jetting around on spaceships, flying between the stars at the speed of light – and then when it’s time to do some calculations they whip out their slide rules.)

Well a guy can dream can't he?

Crime and the Law of Large Numbers

Take a poor kid who has committed a crime.  How do we evaluate that ethically as human beings?  Conservatives will say throw the book at 'em.  The liberal attitude (though since Clinton few liberals appear strong enough to ever admit it) is to look at the kid's background and be more forgiving.  I would argue that ethically, we must approach this kind of situation with two minds simultaneously: as a judge, and as a ruler (there's also as a priest, who looks at the sin, and seeks to understand and forgive it, but let's put that aside for now). 

• Judge.  As a judge we look at an individual's actions, and judge them according to our notions of right and wrong.  End of story.
• Ruler.  As a ruler (policymaker) interested in the public good (let's imagine), your goal is to achieve social stability and justice.  From that point of view, you have to recognize that environment leads to crime. 

In other words, faced with an individual who mugged somebody we must be judgmental and censorious (as well as appropriately merciful).  But facing a city full of muggers, we must recognize that, through the law of large numbers, there are environmental factors that CAUSE bad behavior. 

As social policy, we cannot but punish bad behavior in individuals, as if each has complete free will.  (After all, whatever happened to the guy in front of you, there are probably other people with the same history who have NOT become muggers.)  But in making policy that applies to groups, we must act as if each is nothing but a complete product of circumstance.

The law of large numbers says that the larger one's sample, the closer to chance expectation the distribution will be.  If you flip a coin four times and get three heads, or 75% of the time, it is unsurprising.  If, however, you flip a coin 10,000 times, and the rate remains 75%, you can be certain the coin is weighted. 

It's safe to assume that in any human society, a certain percentage of citizens will go bad -- become anti-social, criminals, evil.  Perhaps this is an inevitable product of life; perhaps the multitudinous stresses of daily living, getting along with other people, dealing with injustices large and small, reigning in the ego, absorbing the many small assaults on our self-worth with which each person is confronted, and the contours of each person's inborn personality -- perhaps these factors are, like nodes of sound waves in a concert hall, bound to concatenate in certain places, ensuring that a certain percentage of the population slips into behavior that the society cannot accept. 

Let us say that the estimated percentage of citizens over age 10 who will commit a crime in a given year in the United States is N.  Therefore, according to the law of large numbers, if N% of your town's residents are arrested this year, you can feel as though things are in reasonably good order.  However, if the rate is 3N% or 4N%, and your town or city has more than a few individuals, you must conclude that something systematic is wrong.  It is unlikely to be coincidence that so many bad people have happened to land in your town.  There must be some distinct CAUSE for this unfortunate conglomeration of malevolence.  The racist may ascribe it to the number of blacks or latinos in the city or whatever, and conclude nothing can be done.  But an enlightened person realizes that it must be a result of circumstances, and seeks to change the circumstances.  The fact that so many conservatives argue that nothing can or should be done except bear down with ever-harsher punishments, may be a reflection of a racism implicit in their worldview.  Or just an inability to see things with two minds. 

Why "Proper Form" is Elusive

As a triathlete, I’m always reading about how important it is to use proper form in running, swimming and biking.  And of course similar advice is routinely handed out in every other sport as well.  But all this advice needs to be taken with a big ol’ grain of salt (see previous post on same theme).  Here’s why:

In mathematics there’s something called the “traveling salesman problem,” which is really very simple.  Imagine 4 cities spread out on a map, various distances away from each other.  The question is, what route should you take so that you visit each of those cities, yet travel the least distance possible?   

When there are only four cities, it’s easy to solve.  But once you start to expand the number of cities, it quickly gets very difficult – with only 25 cities, there are so many possible routes that a computer measuring one million per second would still take 9.8 billion years to search through them all. (I get this from Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity [1995], a thrilling and mind-blowing book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in such things).

Mathmaticians call this kind of problem an NP Problem – one that is not solveable in “polynomial time.”  There are a number of real world and mathematical problems that manifest this quality of seeming relatively simple to solve, yet which quickly spiral into unmanageable dimensions as you add more factors.  (Among them is the problem of factoring very large numbers, which is what modern encryption is based on and why it is currently unbreakable through brute force mathematical attacks.  It’s easy to multiply a bunch of prime numbers together and get the product, but it turns out it’s next to impossible to reverse the process.)

Anyway, I think about this whenever someone starts lecturing about “proper form.”  Imagine that you are engineer trying to figure out the most efficient way to move human limbs through water for swimming, or across the ground for running, or through space for kicking, batting, throwing, or whacking golf balls.  You have to take into account the particularities of the specific human body you are looking at:

• The size (and possibly strength, flexibility and density) of each bone that is involved in that movement (for many movements, that would be every major bone in the body)
• The strength, flexibility and elasticity of each muscle involved. 
• You may also need to factor in differences in muscle composition, such as the proportion of fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers
• Perhaps other more diffuse differences in metabolism, which could also affect what is the optimum way for a particular person to perform an activity.

I bet that finding the optimum form for a particular person would be an NP problem – a problem with so many variables that no computer could find the best form for you in your lifetime – let alone a single solution that fits everbody (every body).

The way we each tackle this problem seems to be through an approach of evolutionary learning – we flail around more or less randomly (as babies), and eventually through trial and error and the feedback of getting what we want (grabbing a toy when we’re young, getting the ball through the hoop, say, when we’re older), we hone our movements into more and more efficient forms. One way we do this is by trying something, and then adjusting it in different directions to see if our results improve. 

But another thing that Coveney and Highfield talk about is that you can picture the set of all possible solutions to an NP Problem as a topographical landscape.  As you try moving in different directions – adjusting things – you see if you move up hill (toward better solutions) rather than downhill (toward worse ones).  Then, you keep making adjustments until you have gone as high as you can.  The problem is that you might reach the top of a local peak, while there is a much higher peak – a more efficient solution for you – that lies somewhere else in the “solution space.”  And to take advantage of that you'd have to radically restructure and rebuild your stroke from the ground up.  (One person who made the leap and did exactly that is Tiger Woods - an amazing thing.)

So all that is why talk about “proper form” should be taken skeptically.  For your own biomechanics (and biochemistry), there may be one or many completely different forms that will work better than what you are now doing.  That coach who’s yelling at you to change the way you’re doing things is basing that on (best case) nothing more than an approximation of what has been found to be more or less effective by a lot of other people, or (worst case) the current fashion for how things should be done, perhaps based on what has worked for a few elite (and not necessarily typical) athletes.

Of course, there are some basic parameters of physics in every activity.  Also, if you’re a total newbie at something, you’re probably best off listening to a coach to provide some structure to your early flailing.  If you’re reasonably accomplished, the coach will probably just be helping you to try different adjustments in what you’re already doing to see if you can eke out some improvements.

The difficult case would come if you are accomplished at something, self-taught, or a “natural,” and some coach tells you that you’re doing it “all wrong” and tries to get you to completely restructure your form.  Then you have to decide whether to stick with your own body’s evolved solution, or leave that mountaintop and try to find another, higher peak through the textbook solution.  You just can't be sure the peak really is higher.

If you look at successful runners or other athletes or others like pianists, you’ll see a tremendous variety of forms.  There would probably be even more if various trends and fashions didn’t regularly sweep through instruction, standardizing the way people are trained.

The Bottom Falling Out

I learned recently that 3-5 million people starved to death in India in 1943.  Who knew?  No one today seems to remember a one of them.  At least, one never hears about this tragedy in this country.  Is there a god who cares more about me, or you, than he cared about any one of those Indians, and is protecting us?  Not sure why there would be. That reminds me that there is no net -- no bottom to how bad things can get. It makes me realize I (and probably WE - we modern westerners) have a deep-seated, implicit feeling of being somehow Chosen or Protected from harm.  I recognize intellectually that this feeling is foolish -- I worry about cataclysm as much as the next guy -- but it seems to be a characteristic of growing up wealthy and secure.  Or maybe not, maybe it is just characteristic of a certain breed of person.  I bet some people feel our universal vulnerability in their bones. Perhaps some holocaust survivors, for example, fully digested the horror-potential of life (the holocaust being a good example of the bottom falling out, if only one of many in the 20th century) in a way many others have not. Perhaps people from poor nations or poor neighborhoods may be immune to the illusion as well. Or war veterans who've seen terrible things. 

Perhaps such people are more clearsighted about things.  Perhaps more ruthless.  Perhaps more frightened and full of hate and eager to start wars.  Perhaps an existential illusion of fundamental safety is key to successful liberal society in some way. 

Or maybe it's not such an illusion, but just a rational assessment that such sweeping cataclysms are not likely to strike in contemporary America.

Triathlons: or, nobody knows nothin'

I've been doing triathlons for two years now, and in that time I've done a lot of reading about the best way to do things. What is the best workout strategy to build up your ability, to get faster, to go longer?  What are the best things to eat and drink?  How much rest should you take to be maximally ready for a race?  I've taken a crash course in sports medicine. 

My conclusion: nobody knows nothin'. Everyone's got a theory, most of them stated with utter confidence as God's truth, but few of them backed up with anything close to rigid science.  Even where there is a study behind a recommendation, it's usually only one, and that's just not enough.  Even in physics -- in theory the most "mathematical" of the sciences -- finding's aren't accepted until they are repeated many times.  When it comes to anything involving human beings, where there will always be a zillion variables (from the length of your femur to what you had for breakfast 2 days earlier) and an inability to treat people enough like lab rats to eliminate them all, there's just no way that you can be sure that anyone's theory about how to approach sports is right for you.

To take just one example, everyone who does triathlons and other endurance sports hears about how lactic acid buildup is what makes your muscles burn and get tired, and that you have to do workouts based on your "lactic threshold" and so on.  But then I open up my New York Times one day to read that that's all wrong.

My advice is to:

1. Read up on all the theories (for every theory there's usually an equal and opposite theory), and file them away. If you come across any studies, great, weigh those more but not too much.
2. Pay a lot of attention to anecdotal reports of what real human beings tell you has worked for them.  But these are only data points -- people's own conclusions about what works for them can themselves be way off because -- again -- there are always too many variables, and people tend to lock in on certain perceived patterns way prematurely, with way too small a sample size of their own experiences.  (This is why science is based on studies, not anecdotes.)
3. Don't take all the science too seriously, generally you won't find useful answers there.  That's not to say it can't be useful, of course. For example, to get back to the "lactic threshold," even if that theory is completely wrong in describing what goes on in your muscles, that might not matter a bit if the workouts you design based on that wrong theory are ones that work.  Philosophers of science debate the merits of what are called the "Realist" and "Anti-Realist" positions, with the former claiming that (say) electrons are real entities, while the anti-realists say we have no idea if they're real, but it doesn't matter what's really going on in there as long as our concept produces useful descriptions and predictions of our observations.  To take another examples, Chinese acupuncturists talk about manipulating the Qi or Chi, some invisible "life force" supposedly flows through our bodies.  I'm sure there is no such thing, but if it serves as a heuristic device that accurately guides the relief of pain, then who cares?
   
4. Above all, try to figure out what works for you.

It is possible, that if I were to really study academic sports medicine, I would realize that that I'm being a know-nothing, there is a lot more certain knowledge than I realize, and that my impression is due to the fact that I've done most of my research on the Internet.  I'm open to that but it sure doesn't look that way from here.  (I guess I'm kinda applying my theory to itself here -- my theory about not trusting theories should itself not be trusted. Go snack on that one :)

In general, it consistently amazes me how bursting with confidence people are when they proclaim theories they should be a lot more circumspect about.  That applies not just in sports but in all areas of life to everyone from doctors and other experts to taxi drivers.  But I guess that's an observation as old as Plato...

Thinking abstractly to think ethically

People are generally decent to those around them. At the least, they have a clear understanding more or less of right & wrong. But when it comes to setting *policy*, then you have to shift your thinking to a mass scale. Then theory and abstractness enter the equation and many people's understanding breaks down, their intuitions fail them.  Face-to-face means of making judgments no longer suffice. Good people accept bad *theories* (at one level or another - but more abstract than the implicit theories behind face to face interactions) and cruelty and needless suffering result. This is why anecdotal stories play such a disproportionate role in policy-making -- they connect the two realms, if not particularly reliably.

The vast majority of people the vast majority of time are good people more or less to those who are in their community with them. But when you go beyond that community, whether through how to treat the poor in America, or how to deal with the tribe across the river, that breaks down. Perhaps the mistake people make is of viewing other groups & communities as single persons, trying to evaluate their intent, mindset, objectives, etc., as a unitary thing.  That works with another individual, more or less, but fails with these larger groups because unlike (or at least less so than) individuals, they are not coherent consciousnesses but ever-shifting, faction-filled groups with all human impulses from the generous to the selfish, the humble to the aggressive, represented in a shifting degree -- and in degree that responds dynamically to how they are treated.

So it’s a problem with democracy.  But it’s still the worst form of government, except for all the others.

Multiple personalities: we all have 'em

I once had a friend who I liked a lot.  He was a great guy.  Then another person very close to me, went to work with him – and couldn’t stand him. Really came to hate his guts.  That led me to a theory that everyone has 3 personalities:

1. how they deal with superiors
2. how they deal with peers
3. how they deal with employees

Some people have three almost schizophrenically varying personalities, while for others they are barely distinguishable – they treat the CEO much the same as the janitor. The vast majority of us, I suspect, are in the middle somewhere, partly depending on such factors as how attuned we are to social gradations, how much we are impervious or vulnerable to the particular authorities above us in a hierarchy, etc.

People are least themselves in the first role, more so in the second, and in some ways their true nature really emerges in the third role. (That is the problem with relationships that start in hierarchies; the lower-level person is likely to have a fairly clear sense of what the boss is really like in all his or her roles   – or at least in the truest – but the boss only sees the superior-dealing personality of the inferior.)

It seems pretty clear that many people are not truly “themselves” when dealing with their superiors, because they are keen to present an idealized view of themselves, and so are constantly monitoring and trimming themselves and their natural impulses and behavior.  Likewise, many people may be somewhat self-conscious among their peers, whom they remain anxious to impress, while in the presence of their inferiors, they are more or less at liberty to let their hair down

Another argument could be made that people are most truly “themselves” in the second role, of dealing with their peers. That might be especially true when they are with people who are their true peers – people they are entirely comfortable with.  Of course, nominal peers that one does not know well or with whom one is not comfortable could be said to not truly be peers – they are merely people whose (social) hierarchical position is ambiguous and yet to be firmly established. 

But I would argue that position #2 is the healthiest, the most prone to produce happiness, because it prodcues the right balance of a) self-awareness and self-discipline – so that one’s inner spoiled child is not set free to torment others as tends to happen when a person posesses too much power – and b) freedom to express yourself with minimal self-limiting and -monitoring. 

In the end, of course, there is no “true self” that lies underneath these relationships.  We are defined by the situations we find ourselves in.  That is why it is important to have a democratic, egalitarian, middle class society, including democratic workplaces, where role #2 holds true most of the time, and roles #1 and #3 are always provisional and temporary and situationally bounded.

Maybe this is an overly hierarchical way of looking at the world, but hierarchy does seem to be central to other primates, and I suspect that, although we are far more complicated, hierarchy is a one layer or facet of our reality much of the time.  Sometimes it might be obvious, as in the military or a corporation, while other times it might be a subtle phenomenon of status or social hierarchy, as among the members of the local club.

People are fools. . .

I recently came across these excellent quotes from the ancient Greek thinker Democritus.  I like these because they are on the subject of happiness, or how to live a good life, the original and greatest subject of philosophy and a subject I have a few opinions about (more anon):

People are fools who yearn for what is absent, but neglect what they have even when it is more valuable than what they don’t.

He is fortunate who is happy with moderate means, unfortunate who is unhappy with great possessions.

Cheerfulness or well-being is created in man through a harmonious life and moderation of enjoyment. Excess and want are forever changing and cause great disturbance in the soul. Souls that are stirred by great disturbances are neither stable nor cheerful. Therefore one must keep one’s mind on what is attainable, and be content with what one has, paying little heed to things envied and admired, and not dwelling on them in one’s mind.

Rather, you should consider the lives of those in distress, reflecting on their intense sufferings, in order that your own possessions and condition may seem great and enviable, and you may, by ceasing to desire more, cease to suffer in your soul. . . . If you keep to this way of thinking, you will live more serenely, and will expel those not-negligible curses in life — envy, jealousy and spite.

Violent desire for one thing blinds the soul to all others. Immoderate desire is the mark of a child, not a man. If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.

People are fools who live without enjoyment of life. . .   Of pleasures, those that come most rarely give the greatest enjoyment. Thrift and fasting are beneficial; so too is expenditure at the right time. But to recognize this is the function of a good man. A life without festival is a long road without an inn.

Here is another quote on the same theme, admirable in its conciseness and logic:

"He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."

- Socrates

Of course, if that one were taken too seriously, one would ever get out of bed in the morning. . . . 

Here is one more favorite, kind of funny:

“Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.”

- Honore de Balzac

[All collected from secondary sources not 100% verified]

Why was slavery bad?

Everyone in today’s America agrees on certain core moral truths.  Including, that slavery was bad and racial prejudice wrong. 

But historians have found zero examples of individuals questioning the morality of slavery before the Quakers began trumpeting bizarre objections to what was a universal practice – it had always been part of human life going back to the ancient Romans and Greeks and, as far as anyone could tell, always would be part of human life.  Historians have scoured the record but just haven’t found anyone before the Quakers thinking, “this is just wrong.”  The people who lived in that climate can't really be blamed for supporting slavery, they were purely a product of their times.  But it’s a different matter entirely once the Enlightenment came along, and radical new notions of individual equality, and the British abolished slavery, and the northern US – and yet Southern plantation owners were still arguing for the practice. 

So just what were the mental or moral errors that supporters of slavery or of racial discrimination (or the culture as a whole if you prefer) made? 

Seems to me there were 3 fundamental errors:

• Selfishness.  The most fundamental error was one of selfishness.  Not a lot to say about that:  You suffer, I benefit, too bad.  Violation of Golden Rule, understandable by 5-year-olds.   Perhaps a better word than error is “sin.” 
• Dehumanization.  Viewing slaves as inferior.  The mistake here is one of looking at people who occupy an inferior, degraded social position, and figuring that that position is a “natural” outgrowth of their essential nature rather than a historical accident.  (Interestingly, the Romans never felt a need to see their slaves as biologically inferior – that racialist ideology only grew up as a defensive reaction to the rise of Enlightenment individualism and the idea that “all men are created equal.” )
• Acceptance of hierarchy.  Most people do not think about the world they inherit, they just accept it as The Way Things Are.  Insofar as they were born into a world where blacks were lower down on the social ladder than themselves, any assertion of rights or equality by blacks was perceived as a outrageous assertion of position that violated the Order of Things.  This is hard to recapture for us liberal atomistic individualists, but think of the anger that you might feel if a brand new young intern in your office tried to boss you around in your area of expertise.  For all you know, the intern is a genius, and is better at what you do than you.  But you don’t keep an open mind to that possibility, you just get angry, “where does he get off telling me what to do?” Chances are you're right – but you're also reacting to a violation of hierarchy and a challenge to your place and your status in it.  That’s how a white Southerner saw assertions of equality by blacks.

Some historians have written of the “wages of whiteness” – how whites benefitted psychically from the sense of superiority these racist systems conferred – and how they paid, dearly, through the exploitation that elites made of those attitudes among whites.

So here’s the really interesting question: who is making these same errors today? 

More anon . . .