#43 Lego Titanic and creativity, toxicity of red, a lot of CDs, being green

            Good morning.

            NPR recently had a piece about an Icelandic youngster (age 15 now) who started, at age 10, working on a Lego model of the Titanic.  Brynjar Karl Birgisson is also autistic, by his own account, but said that "autism . . . is not a negative thing. It is a gift, because many people [with autism] are really intelligent — like many people [with autism] can do stuff too.  We are people as well.  We just seem a little bit different on the outside, but the inside, we're always the same."

            The ship required 56,000 Legos (just a few more than we have) and nearly a year to finish.  It's 26 feet long and 5 feet wide.  It's on display in Tennessee at present. 

            I sent the URL for the article to Elliott because we've spent so much time together building with Legos (when he was young).  We follow Lego stuff.  I didn't expect the response I received.

Odd how this is considered a crazy project, that the article has to mention he's autistic, and that a lot of people would probably call him, an adult (a young adult; 15 is on the edge), a loser for undertaking this.  Yet if I were to spend 11 months working on a 26'-long painting, no one would bat an eye and it would be hailed as an artistic achievement.  No real difference from a creative standpoint.

            I told Elliott I'd have to think about that comparison.  He pursued his line of thinking. 

It's all a matter of perception.  Legos are advertised as a kid's toy primarily so people overlook their complex engineering brilliance.  Painting is an "adult" hobby.  Both require a particular mental acuity at high level.  Or compare it to sculpting.  If you glued Lego sized wood chips together to form a giant ship, it would be artistic.  But putting Legos together to the same end is not the same thing.  For no discernible reason.

I wasn't convinced—yet.  One point that occurs to me is whether it's original or copying.  My paint-by-number painting is not original.  The Lego Titanic model is not original.  Elliott painting a 26-foot painting would be original--unless doing a landscape, for example, is also just "copying" (what you see as you paint).  If you glued wood chips together to form a ship that existed nowhere other than your imagination, that would be original; is a wood chip version of the Titanic original?  Kathy made Elliott's point in a subsequent conversation:  putting together a Lego kit from instructions is not creative.  Building something new, or a re-creation of something (i.e., the Titanic) is.

Elliott contended that "there is no creative difference between observing a ship and recreating it with Legos or recreating it in paint.  Both require you to transcribe a complex model into a different medium and scale.  If it took no creativity or engineering skill to make a huge Lego model, little kids would all intuitively build those.  Instead they build crappy little huts that fall over."

My point was slightly different.  "Is there a difference between recreating—with whatever medium—and imagining and creating something entirely new?"  That's the distinction I was making.  Elliott agreed with my point.  "But if that's the distinction between impressive or not, then a portrait should be comparable to building a Titanic model.  I'm just transferring something I'm looking at into a different medium.  The entire art is in the transcription process."

There's the point, I think:  the "transcription process."  I think about some of the most famous Impressionist landscape paintings; the artist was interpreting a scene, not photographing it (although, Kathy argued, even a realistic painting is still creative because it requires a high level of skill and training to paint realistically.  Or to paint a portrait.)

(It would just barely fit in our living room/parlor, across the full interior width of our house from side to side.)

* * *

            While I'm on the subject of painting, more or less, I can report that I never knew that the color red is toxic (literally) or it's unstable.  Bloomberg reported that a guy at Oregon State, Mas Subramanian, a professor of materials science, accidentally developed a new blue.

YInMn blue (pronounced YIN-min) is an amalgam of yttrium, indium oxide, and manganese—elements deep within the periodic table that together form something unique. YInMn was the first blue pigment discovered in more than 200 years. . . .  Subramanian soon realized that by adding copper, he could make a green. With iron, he got orange. Zinc and titanium, a muted purple.  Scanning these creations, scattered across his workbench like evidence of a Willy Wonka bender, he frowns. "We've made other colors," he says. "But we haven't found red."

            This is a big deal (which, I confess, had never occurred to me before).  A new color is worth hundreds of millions of dollars (e.g., in plastics, cosmetics, cars, construction).  "More than 200 natural and synthetic red pigments exist today, but each has issues with safety, stability, chromaticity, and/or opacity.  Red 254, aka Ferrari red, for example, is safe and popular, but it's also carbon-based, leaving it susceptible to fading in the rain or the heat."  The director of "Harvard's Straus Center for Conservation & Technical Studies and curator of the Forbes Pigment Collection" (how's that for a job title?) says that the problem with Red 254 is true of all organically-based colors:  they fade.  The only red that "is stable, nontoxic, and everlasting:  iron oxide, or red ocher, the ruddy clay found in Paleolithic cave paintings."  But that's not the color that comes to mind for most of us when we think "red."  So, Subramanian continues to search for a YInMn red.

            (The story behind the historical search for blue is an interesting one all by itself, but not one I'm going to narrate here.  But YInMn blue won't be widely used in the near future.  Oregon State, which shares ownership of it with Subramanian—a common arrangement in universities—granted an exclusive license to a company, Shepherd Color Co., to produce it. 

The early market for Shepherd has been limited somewhat by its high price, a function of the cost of indium, a metal primarily used in the clear, thin, conductive layer of smartphone touchscreens.  For this purpose it needs to be exceptionally pure, which, coupled with high demand, meant it was selling for $720 per kilogram at the end of 2017.  (The figure for manganese was $1.74.)  As a result, Shepherd lists YInMn blue at $1,000 per kilogram, by far its most expensive pigment.  Ryan, Shepherd's marketing manager, jokes that unless an indium meteor crashes into southwestern Ohio, the price will remain high.)

            Anyway, the quest for a non-toxic, stable, non-deteriorating/fading red continues.  Many widely-used reds (e.g., Monet, van Gogh, and Munch) contained cadmium, which is now deemed carcinogenic (although not banned).  So is cobalt, used in blues.  Another possibility for a red used rare elements, rendering it so expensive it was impractical.

            I sent Elliott the article and asked him about red.  He knew.  "Yep.  All the red pigments suck or are toxic.  That's why I paint with gloves.  Because I use the latter.  The heavy metals in the paint get into your skin.  Or you can breathe it in while it's being mixed with the paint thinner, depending which variety of toxic you've got."

            So in all the red you own, it's either toxic or it will fade.

* * *

            Although there was certainly no harm done—to the contrary, I suppose—I learned that it pays to read carefully when one is ordering items online.  I was browsing for new classical music CDs, focused on the Baroque, and found a set of the complete keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.  I like his music, so I decided to order the set.  I don't remember what I paid, but it wasn't a large amount, maybe $35-40. 

            When the package arrived, I was puzzled why it was as big as it was.  I opened it and found the set of CDs—all 34 of them!  I won't be able to listen to the full set more than a few times before I die.  I'm glad I like Scarlatti. . . .

            There is a sad story behind them.  Scott Ross, the musician who recorded all 555 sonatas—and it was just one guy—was dying of AIDS when he was making the recordings.  He began recording in June 1984 and finished in September 1985—and died in 1989 at age 38 (of pneumonia related to AIDS).  By the time he died, however, he had recorded a large number of CDs of Baroque music—he was a superb and highly-regarded musician.

* * *

            (Shortly after I composed the following paragraphs, Minnesota Public Radio highlighted this article.)

It is difficult to be really green.  Two researchers, one at Lund University in Sweden and the other at the University of British Columbia, published an article in Environmental Research Letters identifying four ways that people can change their "individual lifestyle choices and calculate their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," based on a wide-ranging study of developed nations.  There are many things one can do, they point out, but there are four steps that would have the largest impact:  "having one fewer child, living car-free, avoiding airplane travel, and eating a plant-based diet [CO₂ emissions per action deleted]."

            I am sure that they are correct in asserting that those four actions would have the greatest impact on greenhouse gas emissions.  I am also sure that I would not follow them.  If Pat and I had had one fewer children, we would now be childless, a situation that would be devastating for anyone who was a parent.  Living car-free would mean that a 10-15-minute commute to work turns into an hour or more on public transit, so a sacrifice of 22,500 hours per year (an additional 45 minutes per day each way x ~250 work days per year), to say nothing of the difficulty and time required just to get groceries.  Yes, one can read or work on an iPad or listen to music, but that's disjointed because our commute requires two transfers.  Avoiding airplane travel, along with having no car, essentially means no travel, period.  In Europe you can do much travel by train, but not in the U.S.  Finally, there is zero chance that I (or almost anyone I know) will voluntarily become a vegetarian, much less a vegan.  The implication of their statement is that one should become a vegan, because dairy and egg products require animals.

            So, while their conclusions about the most efficacious individual actions we can take to reduce CO₂ emissions are no doubt accurate, they fall in the utopian category:  the recommendations (probably not the authors) seek a world they want to be, that they wish could be.  My view is that we (that is, the world) needs to speed up clean energy production (including much more research) and adopt public policies that mitigate global warming without expecting the great mass of people to make such dramatic changes in their lives, some of which are nearly impossible.

(For anyone who wants to read the original, here's the pdf:  http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf)

Warmly (and it finally actually is, here in Minneapolis)—

Gary

#42 Snow, re-reading books, rats and TB, predatory journals, student loan debt, six months

Good morning.

            Many Minnesotans love to bemoan, celebrate, or at least remark about the weather.  I do all three, at various times of the year.  I'm not sure, however, that I needed to live through three record-setting meteorological events in April of this year:  the most snow ever recorded in the Twin Cities in the month of April, the single largest snowfall ever recorded in the Twin Cities in April, and the most snow on the ground ever recorded at this time of the year.  Our yard reflects these records:  looking out the back door at about 8:15 a.m. on April 16.  The deck table has ~16 inches of snow on it.

Even if Kathy and I were already snowbirds, wintering elsewhere for a few weeks, we'd have returned to this mess.  We may have to reconsider our return date.  Or, as Kathy said, if our apartment/condo lease has run out, we might just stay in a hotel a few more days and at least wait until the plows have done their work.

In the meantime, this is how we Minnesotans deal with winter.

(courtesy of my friend Roberta Sonnesyn)

* * *

The statement that "No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading" is attributed to Susan Sontag.  I'd like to ask her about the claim (but I can't, because she died in 2004), because I don't agree.  For those of us who like junk murder/detective stories, for example, it is a happy pastime—but few of the books are worth re-reading.  Even outside that genre, I've read plenty of books that I enjoyed but that were not worth a second time through.

The key phrase may be "worth reading."  I suppose Ms. Sontag might not put murder mysteries in the "worth reading" category.  If so, then I'd still disagree with her because they provide pleasure on reading once.

* * *

            One hopes that this discovery isn't going to be especially pertinent to the U.S., or to our children and grandchildren, but it's an interesting one.  Last year there were 9,272 cases of tuberculosis (TB) in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control.  In 2010 there were 11,182, so the number has declined.  Unfortunately, the CDC also reports that "one fourth of the world's population is infected with TB.  In 2016, 10.4 million people around the world became sick with TB disease. There were 1.7 million TB-related deaths worldwide."

            The research finding won't treat the disease—but it will help in diagnosis.  It seems that when "trained rats were given children's sputum samples to sniff, the animals were able to pinpoint 68 percent more cases of TB infections than detected through a standard smear test."  The discovery was made at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania (no, even after a career in higher education, I've never heard of this place, but the research was published in what appears to be a distinguished journal under the auspices of the International Pediatric Research Foundation).  The impetus for the research was anecdotal evidence that people with TB have a peculiar smell.

            As the numbers suggest, TB is a significant problem in parts of the world.  This discovery allows better detection—and treatment.  (The kids who were in the research study who, it was learned from the rats but not the standard smear test that had TB, were sent to clinics for treatment.) 

            Some organization will have to start training rats.

* * *

"Murky world of 'science' journals a new frontier for climate deniers" is the title of an article by Graham Readfearn in the [British] Guardian.  It's a growing problem in a number of academic disciplines but it becomes more alarming in fields that are heavily politicized and where decisions will have a profound effect on life.  In the case of the journals that Readfearn highlights—similar to those in other fields—these fake science journals often publish without peer review, or with very little peer review.  As my friends in higher education know, with rare exceptions, articles that aren't peer-reviewed and in journals that don't insist on peer review are usually not worth much credit or attention.

Here are some of the titles that Readfearn calls out; don't they sound like they should be credible sources?  International Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences, International Journal of Research in Earth and Environmental Sciences, and the International Journal of Environmental Sciences.  (I italicized them, as journal titles, but holding my nose while doing so.)  Some of these journals are "predatory":  they seek academic authors but neglect to inform them of fees that the author will be charged for publishing in the journal or declaring they have peer review when they don't—or at least not in any professional sense of the phrase.  As Readfearn informs us, "journals that are 'open access' make their money by charging academics or institutions a fee for peer reviewing and checking submitted academic manuscripts, and then publishing them.  There are many reputable publishers working this way." 

Also predators, Readfearn maintains, are the "climate science deniers looking to take advantage of the questionable quality controls in return for getting their work published in what the publishers claim are 'peer-reviewed journals' but that, in reality, are not."  More than one distinguished academic scientist has dismissed the papers, one calling them "laughable" and another maintaining that none of them would pass legitimate peer review used by reputable journals.

Part of the problem arises because of the pressure on young academics—in almost all fields—to publish in order to obtain tenure or advancement.  There aren't enough journals in some fields to accommodate the demand, so these shady journals begin publishing and have far lower standards for evaluating papers.  Online journals, of course, are extremely cheap to create.  I could start one if I were of a mind to do so.

Reading this piece from the Guardian dismays me because it is so easy for people to be duped by these phony journals and the phony "science" they publish.  I've spent a good part of my professional life reading academic journal articles, and examining the sources, the author credentials, and the journals, so I think I can usually distinguish between the legitimate and the not, but that isn't experience or training that most people have.  (As I have written before:  Elliott concluded, after he graduated from college, that the two most useful courses he took—apart from his art instruction—were, during the year he was a Psychology major, research methods and statistics.  The former is the kind of course that teaches students to be on the lookout for publications that are not credible.)

            Shortly after the Guardian piece, space.com published an article about a phony "experiment" about exceeding warp 10 on Star Trek.  The "experiment" demonstrates that when people cross that boundary, they turn amphibious, but they were returned to human form by the end.  The author and his affiliation were fictitious, but out of 10 journals he submitted it to, five accepted the article and one published it.  "The paper calls for future studies on the impact of warp 10 on human genetics and physical changes.  Speaking as though the experiment were fact instead of fiction, BioTrekkie [the pseudonym of the author] said, 'Given we now know what to expect, we can impose the intense antiproton burst regiment treatment early— we can build it into the shuttle as a metamorphosis compensator.'"

            The journals all had high publication fees and no or trivial "peer review."  The journal that published the article, like many such, has a title that sounds legitimate:  "American Research Journal of Biosciences."

            My curiosity was aroused:  Did the University of Minnesota libraries subscribe to any of these journals?  Libraries at large research universities subscribe to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of research journals.  I believe they are the single largest expense in a research library.  I discovered that Minnesota did subscribe to one of them, the International Journal of Environmental Sciences.  So much for my long experience in evaluating the legitimacy of journals.  I looked at the website; it looked like it could be reputable, although the editorial board was all over the place, both geographically and in credentials.  So I asked a long-time biologist friend if the journal was legitimate; she didn't know but asked one of the University librarians.

            The librarian took a look and was doubtful; she "found a few points that, put together, would cause me to wonder about its legitimacy."  The librarian's training was evident in her review of the journal.  The following itemization is a quote from her.

--         Very broad topic, as are most of the journals from this publisher

--         Editorial board with little focus - it includes chemists, foresters, etc.

--         Two of the three US folks on the editorial board work in industry

--         Submission via e-mail and not a regular submission software

--         The description of the turn-around time makes me wonder how much copy editing really happens

--         At least one author [of a journal article submitted] needs to be a "member", which involves a fee, and this info is buried on the Web pages, not mentioned upfront as part of the submission instructions

--         Membership allows publication in any of their journals, which given the wide range of topics would seem highly unlikely

--         The list of 40 databases where their journals are indexed is a sorry lot. Embarrassing, really.

--         No issues since Jan 2017

She concluded by writing that "I'd have to say I am with Guardian.  We need journals that provide a platform for researchers from all parts of the world but this is not the best way to run one."  She was uncertain how the University subscribed to it, but it's free, and if someone in a department requested it, the library likely accommodated a no-cost request.

            Even the experienced among us can be flummoxed.

            From my friend who got me connected with the science librarian.

* * *

            Two people affiliated with the Urban Institute, Sandy Baum (senior fellow, Education Policy Program, professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College, accurately described as "an expert on higher education finance") and Victoria Lee (research assistant, Education Policy Program) recently published a piece that should quieten some of the clamoring about the debt that students are taking on in order to pay for college.  There is clearly a problem (one that could be eliminated if we made college free for all who qualified, as does part of northern Europe, but that's another issue), but the recurring media coverage exaggerates the impact of the burden.

            What Baum and Lee point out is that "most outstanding student debt is held by people with relatively high incomes."  While it is true that "too many students enroll in college but leave school without completing a credential . . . [and] some students complete their programs only to discover that because of either the institutions they attended or the fields in which they earned their degrees, they can't find jobs that reward their education."  The problem is exacerbated when unemployment is high, which it is not right now.

            They provide a couple of useful illustrations.

            The data demonstrate that "households in the top quartile of the income distribution, with incomes above $81,140 in 2016, held about half of all outstanding education debt.  The top 10 percent of households, with incomes of $144,720 or higher, held 24 percent of the debt."  As they observe, more debt is typically associated with more education, and, also typically, more education is associated with higher incomes.  Some of that debt held by higher-income households is from professional or graduate school, people who earn degrees that will generate a higher income.  "The education many of them borrowed to pay for is also what helped them rise toward the top of the income distribution.  In fact, 57 percent of outstanding student debt is owed by households with graduate degrees."  While some of the horror stories are truly horrible, in general they are not, but the horror stories get the headlines.

(I recall seeing data on student debt at the University of Minnesota and one example jumped out:  some poor kid ran up over $100,000 in student debt in order to earn a bachelor's degree in the humanities.  That was the extreme outlier in U of M data, and that kid didn't get good advice.  One wonders why he/she didn't receive any non-loan financial aid; perhaps it was because the parental income was too high.  The U data at the time I saw it suggested that Minnesota students were not running up inordinate amounts of debt for their bachelor's degree.)

Baum and Lee also observe, a qualifier that many commenters miss, that just because someone has college debt doesn't mean they're worse off than someone who doesn't have such debt.  Many of those with no debt also didn't go to college or any post-secondary education.  Both the near-term and long-term prospects for the latter group are bleak.

It's also true that an average debt of $23,800 for households that have an income of no more than $22,500 is a terrible burden.  The lowest income quartile includes more borrowers than it does share of debt.  People in this quartile may have some college or perhaps a two-year degree; few have a four-year degree.  Their prospects for acquiring a job that will allow them to pay off the debt are not great.

There's a policy implication in the Baum and Lee findings:

The concentration of education debt among the relatively affluent means that some policies designed to reduce the burden of education debt are actually regressive.  Focusing on lowering the interest rate on all outstanding student debt or on forgiving large amounts of that debt would bestow significant benefits on relatively well-off people.

As they observe, focusing on the plight of the lowest-income group would serve society better than giving more benefits to the well-to-do. 

             

* * *

            It is six months today since Krystin died (Tuesday, 10/17 – Tuesday, 4/17).  I still find it hard to believe she's gone and I still have the urge to send/forward items to her, before I stop and realize I can't.  I suppose this will trail off as time passes.  I note that a couple of her friends occasionally post items to her Facebook page.  I'm glad they do.

            May you have spring where you live.  We don't.

Gary

#41 5x5 rule, evil, uncertainty, wealth and luck, sexual harassment revisited

Good morning.

            Sometimes among the dreck there are a few gems.  I ran across one Internet meme that I liked, the 5 x 5 rule:  "If it's not gonna matter in 5 years, don't spend more than 5 minutes upset by it."  I'm not sure about using five years as the standard because there can be short-term concerns that are worth being upset about, but the general advice seems to me to be worthwhile.  I need to remember this at night in particular, those times when my brain will not let go of what is invariably a trivial matter that shouldn't bother me at all, much less that it will matter in five years, but that will not let me sleep.

* * *

It isn't possible to speak apodictically about evil, but one can muse about it.  My comments on the Lord's Prayer provoked a brief exchange with a minister friend of mine (for whom I have enormous respect) about the distinction between "lead us not into . . . " and "let us not fall into . . . " and about the nature of evil.

            My friend the minister observes that

we monotheists do not do well with the concept of evil, and God's role in evil in our existence.  The Hebrew Bible is really clear about Satan--even being one of God's advisors--and the book of Job really takes this head on.  Modern Jews have adopted Rabbi Kushner's thought that Bad things Happen, and the God walks with us as we live/transform/survive the losses. As Christians we have gotten to the observation you have made, that a loving God wouldn't create that. . . .  BUT it exists. . . .  By and large, Evil is a community characteristic, and sin is personal.

            I wrote back that I was intrigued by the comment that evil is community while sin is personal.  It's individuals who commit evil acts; a community may make them easier or more difficult to commit, but it's one or more individuals who commit the acts.  She explained that "as a group we dislike evil--it is a mystical entity, yet also a high-drama resource for Hollywood.  As long as it is part of the 'out there' for us each personally, it can be real . . . which is what makes it a community-level characteristic.  Second, sin is what we each do when we 'fall out of relationship with the sacred', whether that is Christian or the Brahma sutras, or whomever our own spirituality defines that to be . . . and yes, thus a personal issue. . . ."  She agreed, however, that "there are people who do evil things and may even be described as 'evil'.  We know them from our front pages and penitentiaries."

Wikipedia says there are roughly four positions when it comes to evil:

1.  Moral absolutism holds that good and evil are fixed concepts established by a deity or deities, nature, morality, common sense, or some other source.

2.  Amoralism claims that good and evil are meaningless, that there is no moral ingredient in nature.

3.  Moral relativism holds that standards of good and evil are only products of local culture, custom, or prejudice.

4.  Moral universalism is the attempt to find a compromise between the absolutist sense of morality, and the relativist view; universalism claims that morality is only flexible to a degree, and that what is truly good or evil can be determined by examining what is commonly considered to be evil amongst all humans.

            I'm somewhat in camp #2, but with enough disquiet that I'm also in #4.  One can argue that "evil" is a theological or philosophical term, as is "sin."  Nature indeed does not have a moral element ("red in tooth and claw").  It is not evil when the lions kill their prey, it was not evil when the meteor smashed into the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, it is not evil when a volcano erupts (or a storm hits) and hundreds or thousands of people (and animals) are killed (except insofar as inept, incompetent, or intentional human actions put the people and animals in harm's way).

            With respect to humans, actions can have results I would describe as "good":  promoting individual, societal, and planetary well-being and happiness.  "Bad" actions are those which produce the opposite result.  Of course there are many shades of gray between absolute good and bad, and I'm not even sure there is an absolute in either case. 

            All of us can, if we stop to think about it, trace a causal chain of events that led up to whatever we just did.  I put ice cubes in the water because I don't like drinking scotch and water at room temperature; I go to the refrigerator because that's where the ice is; I am drinking the scotch and water because that is something I do with Kathy on some days; I drink scotch and water because I developed a taste for it decades ago; etc.  You can follow the same chain of events for someone who does "bad" things:  commits a murder (it does not promote individual well-being) or rapes someone or steals a car.  Or leads a nation into genocide (see, e.g., Hitler):  circumstances of the country and world at the time, the history of Germany, combined with his background and oratorical skills, led to his rise.  To use the term evil in all of these contexts, in my view, is unhelpful.

            On the other hand, this line of thinking does make me uneasy.  Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote Explaining Hitler, talked with Alan Bullock, the first Hitler biographer (A Study in Tyranny, 1952), who exclaimed to Rosenbaum about Hitler, "If he isn't evil, then who is? . . .  If he isn't evil the word has no meaning."  I'm reluctant to refrain from characterizing Hitler as evil.  There are other figures in history about whom I'd also use the term.

            If bad actions are those that reduce individual, societal, and planetary well-being and happiness, and if I set aside qualms about determinism, then I can talk myself into arguing that bad actions at the further end of the spectrum are "evil."  I cannot draw a line; like Justice Stewart and pornography, I know it when I see it even if I can't define it.  One discrimination I can ponder is that an individual action—murder, rape, theft—may not rise to the level of evil, especially when it's possible to trace a probable causal chain of events that led to the act.  A conscious political act, or pursuit of acts, that will lead to widespread death or poverty (thus premature death in many cases) or debasement of human life would meet my definition of evil.  (Following that line of reasoning, I can conclude that libertarian and many GOP political positions on economic matters, because of the consequences that would ensue if they were adopted, are evil.  Opposition to addressing the threat of climate change would fall in the same category.)

            A topic that requires more thought than one brief post.

* * *

            Relatedly, sort of.

            There are physicists who maintain that a determinist view of the world—hard or soft—is untenable in light of quantum physics, where matter is not matter and nothing can be measured without affecting its state.  It's not clear to me why that uncertainty about the subatomic level has anything to do with the atomic level at which we live.  It may be impossible to measure an electron and it is true that all matter is largely space between the components of the atoms, but nonetheless the atoms behave in predictable ways.  If you combine two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, you will get a molecule of water.  Chemistry works because it's predictable.  So the monkey wrench the physicists want to throw into the machinery of life doesn't seem to me to be very heavy (or persuasive).

            Maybe the physical scientists who read this will tell me I'm full of baloney.

* * *

            A question posed in human society for a long time, and one that bears directly on my diatribe against libertarian economic policy, is this one:  "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"  Some very clever people at the University of Catania in Italy have provided an answer through research that seems well done—and that strikes me on its face as logical and likely.  You may have seen reports about this research; their answer is "it's just plain luck."

            In general, the distribution of wealth follows what is known as a power law:  20% of the people have 80% of the wealth.  (It may be that fewer than 20% have that much; I haven't seen the exact numbers.)  That power rule is true for many social phenomenon (80% of medical costs are from 20% of the patients, etc.).  In many or most cases, the 80/20 rule doesn't cause much controversy, but when it comes to the distribution of wealth, it does.  One reason is the dissimilarity in the distribution of wealth and talent.

The conventional answer [explaining the unequal distribution of wealth] is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on.  Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role.

But there is a problem with this idea:  while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value.  For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern.  Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.  The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked.  Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.  [Similarly for height and weight:  none of us are as tall as a multi-story building nor as short as a soup can.]

And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people.  What's more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures.

            So, the folks at Catania asked, what determines how people become rich?  They ran multiple simulations using a quite sophisticated "computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life."  They gave people various levels of talent and intelligence and other human characteristics, as they are distributed in life.  Plotting the working lifetimes of 40 years, with random events (positive and negative) distributed in the lives, they looked at what happened. 

            What they found was that the 80/20 rule held, but the 20% who held 80% of the wealth were not the most talented "(although they must have a certain level of talent).  They are the luckiest."  They have to have some talent, in order to take advantage of events to grow wealthier, but it isn't the smartest that rose to the top in terms of wealth.  Conversely, those near the bottom of the wealth scale were also the unluckiest.

            As far as I'm concerned, this finding puts paid the idea that you can always work your way out of poverty.  Sure you can, if you have a little luck.  This research alone suggests the importance of the social safety net:  there are plenty of people who are in the economic predicament they are through no fault of their own.  Also conversely, there are plenty of people who are far better off than their merits suggest they would be without being lucky. 

            Luck starts with choosing one's parents wisely.  Krystin and Elliott, from an economic standpoint, were not lucky when they had Pat and me as parents rather than Bill and Melinda Gates.  (That statement is not a comment on whether or not the Gates are good parents; I have no idea.)

            The Catania researchers ran a simulation (albeit what appears to be a pretty good one).  The next step is to do some real-life measuring.  I wonder how many of the top 1% would consent to an in-depth analysis of how they came to have their wealth.  I'm pretty sure quite a few in the bottom 10-20% would agree to participate in the study.

           

* * *

            And then there is willpower (which can presumably get you from being poor to being rich and powerful).

            There was an interesting article by an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, Carl Eric Fisher, who works in law, ethics, and psychiatry, who essentially trashes the entire concept of "willpower."  It was a long article; the gist of it is that "willpower" is a leftover from early Christianity (willpower was a way to reconcile sin with divine omnipotence) and Victorian England.  The idea of "self control" or delayed gratification permeates western culture, as does the idea that there's a limit to how much self control one has (that is, you can use it up, run out of it, and then you have problems).  He points out that while the idea that self control is in limited supply in any one human, one supported by years of research in psychology, more careful recent research has largely consigned the proposition to the garbage heap.

            One implication of the idea of "willpower" or self control is that if you don't exercise it, you deserve to be poor, or a drunk, or whatever, and are worthy of contempt.  The concept has moralistic overtones with a vengeance.  Over the course of the 20th Century, Freud recast self control or willpower as the superego, then B. F. Skinner killed it with behaviorism, charging "that there is no internally based freedom to control behavior."  Some experimental research in psychology with children who had delayed their own gratification led to revived interest in the concept of self control, defined by the American Psychological Association as "the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals."  As in the past, largely Christian perception, it is "usually portrayed as a discrete, limited resource, one that can be used up like a literal store of energy."  Once again, however, further careful review of the existing research basically concluded that the idea of "self control" isn't defensible.

            Professor Fisher recounts the several lines of research into aspects of willpower over the last 20-30 years and concludes that the term has no good definition and little meaning, so it should be discarded or "allowed to continue as an imprecise term, standing in for an inconsistent hodgepodge of various mental functions."  The concept "may simply be a pre-scientific idea—one that was born from social attitudes and philosophical speculation rather than research. . . .  The term has persisted into modern psychology because it has a strong intuitive hold on our imagination:  Seeing willpower as a muscle-like force does seem to match up with some limited examples, such as resisting cravings, and the analogy is reinforced by social expectations stretching back to Victorian moralizing."

The effect of the term, used so broadly, is "pernicious . . . distracting us from more accurate ways of understanding human psychology and even detracting from our efforts toward meaningful self-control."  The social policy implications of the concept are significant, he argued. 

Notions of willpower are easily stigmatizing:  It becomes OK to dismantle social safety nets if poverty is a problem of financial discipline, or if health is one of personal discipline.  An extreme example is the punitive approach of our endless drug war, which dismisses substance use problems as primarily the result of individual choices.

            As someone largely a determinist when it comes to human behavior (although, as I wrote, not happy about that conclusion), dropping the idea of "will power" or "self control" makes good sense.  The more logical explanation of destructive behavior is that genetics plus environment led to it, and to assume someone can counteract those forces is not realistic (nor supported by evidence).

* * *

            A friend of mine, a biologist who taught at the University for many years, wrote to me about sexual harassment.  I reproduce her message with her permission.

I am frustrated that there seems to be a serious blurring of the lines between flirting, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.  They are on such different scales and such different intentions.  We are biological organisms with all the reproductive impulses that evolution has selected for.  (Those with the strongest impulses had the most offspring so the genes that code for those impulses are in the majority.)  And these are STRONG impulses. 

The purpose of life is to reproduce. The attractions we may have for those around us, the flirting that is a "testing of the waters" for reproductive activity—that is an expected part of our biology.  We see it in all animals.   And the teasing and the joking has been accepted as part of our culture/society.  The line that is stepped over is when the recipient of the flirting/teasing/joking says "stop" and the behavior continues or escalates.

(Sexual assault is so far over the line it is in the next universe!  But, unfortunately, there is a biological basis for sexual assault as well.  Back to that damn reproductive success equation.)

I think we are now seeing a "stop with the teasing/joking"  coming from women . . . but I think it has be a universal "stop" so the baiting with dress and behavior should also stop.  Maybe then we can focus on appropriate behaviors in the workplace, on the street, everywhere.

My god, I sound like a prude when I say that. . . .  Sex and gender, in all its rainbow colors and permutations, is an amazing part of biology and we should celebrate and enjoy this great part of being human (being animal, being alive).  With a very important commitment to honor and accept that each individual gets to set their own personal limits.

Your statement that you haven't seen sexual harassment at the U (although you know it is there):  I agree.  I have not seen it either.  However, I have seen people being inconsiderate jerks but they have been equal opportunity inconsiderate jerks—being horrible to both women and men.  I know I have been lucky to not have experienced sexual harassment but I do think it is partly a function of the quality of men and women with whom I have had the amazing luck to work.

            For those in Minnesota and Wisconsin, enjoy the snow!  (Ugh.)

Gary