#81 simplism, the pandemic and me, why decrepitude, walking, events, physician interaction

                                                                                                October 29, 2020

Good morning.

            A few months ago Ian Leslie (writer, author of CURIOUS: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It, and writer/presenter on the BBC), wrote an article in the (UK) New Statesman that offers insight into current politics both in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.

            Leslie observes that "We know a lot less than we think about the world – which explains the allure of 'simplism.'" He begins with the example of a zipper ("zip" in the UK) and a 2002 study. The researchers

asked people to rate their own understanding of how zips work. The respondents answered very confidently – after all, they used zips all the time. But when asked to explain how a zip works, they failed dismally. Similar results have been obtained with respect to flush toilets, piano keys, helicopters and bicycles. It doesn't just apply to physical objects: people have been found to overestimate their understanding of climate change, the tax system and foreign policy.

The point is, we all think we understand things that we do not, and that misapprehension of our knowledge becomes a political problem. Leslie uses a good example, the cliffs of Dover.

From 30,000 feet, Britain's coastline has a familiar sweep and shape. Zoom closer in – to, say, the cliffs of Dover – and it becomes less easy to comprehend. All you can see is a confusing series of jagged edges; down on the beach, peering at rocks with a magnifying glass, the coastline refuses to resolve itself into a regular pattern. The closer you look, the more that comprehension eludes you.

That is reality, Leslie maintains. The more you consider a complex matter, often there are more questions than answers, and the more complex the matter, the more there are questions. This is what is known as "the illusion of explanatory depth" or "the knowledge illusion." Taken as a whole, we know a great deal, but on an individual level, knowledge is uneven and few master the details of complex issues. We nonetheless believe we understand many of the great problems facing the world: climate change, racism, wealth inequality, astrophysics, and so on. It is only when pressed that we realize—and admit—that we know squat about something.

            In the experiments, after realizing they really don't understand something, people concede their ignorance, Leslie says. But in politics now, politicians never like to acknowledge they didn't know something or that life is complex. "They have no idea how zippers work, but they have very strong views on how to make them. The disease of politics today is not populism, so much, as simplism: the oversimplification of complex problems." Slogans and sound bites have long been a part of campaigns, but it becomes more and more problematic as challenges become more and more complex.

            It is not just the political figures. "Voters are simplists too. We live in an increasingly globalised, diverse, interdependent, technology-led society, but most of us don't like to think about it. We take for granted enormously complex achievements, such as the presence of milk in your supermarket, or the phone in your pocket." Even though we don't understand things (e.g., immigration, climate change), we think we do—and have strong opinions about them. Leslie observes that "it's almost an axiom: any issue worthy of public debate is too complicated for most voters to understand." But we don't like to believe we don't understand issues because then we feel we don't have control over them; that is the point at which voters rebel against complexity and vote for simplicity.

            Leslie reports that

Simplism is changing the way we feel about each other, too. Dan Kahan, a Yale professor, is one of America's leading experts on political polarisation, and one of his findings is that partisanship results from incuriosity. If you have a very different opinion to me on immigration, that might be because you have a very different experience of it from me. But to contemplate your different life experience requires an expense of brainpower to which most of us are unwilling to commit. It's more efficient to dismiss others as bigoted or gullible.

            The left and right in America have their own simplisms. Those on the right reduce things to black and white, such a "voter guide" I've seen circulating on the web, promoted by conservatives, that paints a stark picture of the differences between Biden and Trump. All nuance is lost, and with it accuracy is lost. I believe the left is more capable of addressing complexity, but bores voters in doing so, and the left is quite willing to believe in elites (wealthy, by industry, whatever) controlling the world behind the scenes. On balance, however, I have to say that the right (more to the point, the farther right) is somewhat more prone to cast everything in a good-versus-evil light, with little room for the gray that characterizes most of life.

* * *

I do not like a world where I am depressed. I am never depressed except in extreme circumstances, and even then I recover reasonably well (finding out I was getting divorced, Krystin's death, although the latter is something from which one never fully recovers). But the concatenation of events, some in the larger world, some personal, make me apathetic and tired.  The political scene (about which there is room for guarded optimism, if one is a liberal/progressive, but I'll wait until I see votes counted before being relieved), the pandemic, and (for those of us living in the upper Midwest) this damn early winter (record October snowfalls and low temperatures ending all outdoor social interaction) are the larger forces. (As I commented to a couple of friends, this early winter is so 2020.) The minor factors are irritating medical issues (none life-threatening, none even that serious, and none worth belaboring, but with mild and I think temporary effect on my daily life). All these dumb little medical issues, in combination with the setting of our lives right now, puts me in a state of mind I do not like. At least Elliott & Martha are doing fine and so is Kathy.

We knew this was coming, winter putting an end to outdoor social events, and I'm reminded once again (and often) of the lines from Macbeth: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time." Fortunately, I can be optimistic that it won't be until the last syllable of recorded time, but I know darn well the pandemic effects will remain through next spring or summer. We're less than halfway through them. Most socializing is all done, except with family, until we go to Florida—and we are incredibly glad to have that as something to look forward to as we wind our way through these next isolated 9-10 weeks.

* * *

            How Gary gets off on tangents. And then learns more than he expected to.

            I was grousing to a friend about these medical annoyances and how they seem to be attributable to aging. She wrote back: "I will say that it is discouraging and frustrating how many ailments get attributed to 'aging.' Good grief! Even when you regard yourself as 'healthy,' you still have 'stuff.' I have a boatload of stuff." After I finished laughing, I composed a paragraph about evolution and aging, and then realized that before I spouted off I should perhaps check with a long-time friend who's a retired biologist from the University (and of the people I worked with, one of the ones I admired the most). Here's what I wrote and sent to her:

I think that from an evolutionary standpoint, at our age we're worthless, used up. At the dawn of humanity, women had children at 14-15-16, stuck around long enough to raise them, maybe a few more years to help with infant grandchildren, and then they died at 35-40. Men died equally young for a variety of reasons. We just aren't programmed to live into our 60s and 70s and 80s. So lots of things go wrong because they weren't built to function as long as they now do. But better to be here and put up with the annoyances than the alternative!

            My biologist friend wrote back, and I'm going to simply copy and paste the pertinent part of what she wrote (with her permission) because it is such a good (and clear) explanation.

On aging:  Your explanation is superficially okay, meaning good enough for a non-biologist. So if that is what you want to send to your friend, there is nothing glaringly wrong with it. But the biologist would question "why AREN'T we programmed to live longer?"

The first thing needed to understand aging or any other topic from an evolutionary biology standpoint is that evolution (change in a population over time) is driven by reproductive fitness of individuals in that population. Reproductive fitness is the ability of an individual to pass on its genes into the next generation. Anything that contributes to that fitness that has a genetic basis -- like strength, absence of genetic diseases that kill during reproductive age, social behavior, mating strategies and success, fertility and fecundity -- will be passed on to the next generation in higher amounts by those who have the most offspring (and whose offspring have the most offspring, etc.) Thus, if the peacock's tail increases the number of females that will mate with him, the ability to make that flashy tail will increase in subsequent generations.

So how does aging factor into reproductive fitness?  There are two widely accepted explanations:  the mutation accumulation hypothesis and the antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis. The first reflects that the more a cell divides, the more likely a mutation will occur in its genetic material. Most mutations will be deleterious (because an organism that has evolved to be well adapted to its environment, already has a good mix of the right genes.) If the mutations only affect an individual once it is past reproductive age, there is no natural selection against these mutations so the mutations accumulate in the population. So we all inherit genes that cause negative changes in our bodies as we age.  The second [explanation] posits that some genes may give an advantage to the young (reproductively active) population, but cause some disadvantage in the older (no longer reproducing) population. These genes have a pleiotropic effect (production by one gene of two, seemingly unrelated, effects.)  In the case of aging, the pleiotropic effects are antagonistic -- good for the young, crappy for the old.

I think that the most currently accepted view on aging from an evolutionary biology standpoint is that aging is due to a combination of mutation accumulation and antagonistic pleiotropy. So we get genes that will cause aging because they have no effect in the young or because the effect in the young is a positive one. Put together, we get all the aches and pains and problems of old age.

If you are lucky, your germline has fewer of the mutations and you can live a long life (now that we have vaccines, antibiotics, water sanitation, secure food supply); if you are unlucky, your germline will give you early heart disease, high blood pressure, early onset dementias.

I had to ask what your "germline" is.

These are the cells in a multicellular organism (like us!) that give rise to eggs and sperm. The cells are set aside early in fetal development. [They] pass on the genes from one generation to the next generation (thus the "line") AND are also the cells that give rise to all other cells in the body. 

So what is their significance?  Any mistake (mutation) in a germline cell will be passed on to future generations.  Mistakes in non-germline cells (i.e. all other cells in your body) are NOT passed on to future generations.

If we do gene therapy (gene editing) on the lungs of a person suffering from cystic fibrosis, curing them of the most ravaging effect of this disease, their germline cells will still pass on the CF gene to the next generation.  If, however, we do gene therapy on the egg or sperm or the fertilized egg/very early embryo -- so gene therapy BEFORE the germline cells have been put aside during development (development of the gonads:  ovaries and testes), then that genetic change WILL be passed on to future generations.  Sounds like it would be a good thing, right?  Cure CF before the embryo gets too far in development -- YAY!  But the problem is that we really can't at this time be sure that our gene therapy doesn't have some unforeseen effect.  Maybe it cures CF but causes early kidney failure.  Maybe it cures CF but makes the person significantly more like to have severe lung damage after even a simple cold.  Or maybe it contributes to faulty brain development.  We just don't know because we don't understand the full complexity of how cells work either alone or in combination and communication with all other cells during development.

Thus, there is an international agreement by scientists that we should not be doing gene editing in germlines yet.

            I asked her how my initial narrative intersected with her explanation.

I look at your answer as more of the "effect" than the "cause." You wrote what was observed -- kind of like observing a car accident, chronicling the results of the accident.  By putting in the note about evolution, you were indirectly posing the question "why?"  What caused the accident? What caused us to be "worthless and used up"?

My answer went into the background cause. So your answer was fine to explain the effect and mine simply went into the cause (as we understand it at this moment in time.)

And I think we weren't ready to look at the cause until our life expectancy extended so much. Life expectancy before modern society was quite a bit lower in large part because of so much infant and child mortality (hard to live past 3 years old) but also plagues, famine, etc. It didn't mean no one lived to an older age, just very few. But now many of us live way past reproductive age. So the question of why, if we can live past reproductive age, do we still get old, wear out, and die? 

            So there, for those of my age cohort, more or less, is the current scientific view on why we all go downhill.

* * *

            I sent a message to the two Minnesota Senators. 

Dear Senators Klobuchar and Smith, I write simply to urge you to support any plan to increase the number of Justices on the Supreme Court. With its current membership, it is poised to make some disastrous decisions. But I do not believe a Biden administration has to rush. The Court will make a controversial decision (e.g., reverse Obergefell, declare Social Security and/or Medicare unconstitutional) that will create the impetus and public support to act.  Thank you.

* * *

            We recently did our not-daily-but-it-should-be walk at the Mall of America. We got out there just a bit before the stores open (the mall opens earlier for walkers) and were there for a time after the stores had opened. The place was just about empty even after stores opened. There was no risk of too much crowding; of course a few jerks didn't have masks on and some seem not to understand that the mask has to cover the nose as well as the mouth. But I would guess that 99% of people had masks on. I also discovered that very few of the stores that were there when we used to take the kids to Camp Snoopy 20+ years ago or otherwise go out there shopping are still there: Barnes & Noble, Macys, a Minnesota store, Clarks (shoes), Legoland, and maybe a couple of others. I don't think I've actually *gone shopping* there for well over a decade, although it is the closest mall for us. But in the passage of years, the stores have almost completely turned over. (I think one reason I haven't gone shopping there is because I haven't gone shopping anywhere. I don't need more clothes and the house has pretty much everything required for daily life. When we're aiming to decrease the number of items we possess, shopping consists largely of buying replacement underwear and socks and towels and jeans.)

            The MOA is not a pleasant place to walk, compared to parks and lakes. We'll do it only when we have to. Or we'll stay home. But we'll put on our parkas and long underwear and walk outdoors when wind chills aren't below zero.

* * *

            Despite the downturn in the weather, we have decided it will (barely) permit two more outdoor gatherings. We will remember Krystin on Saturday: Elliott & Martha, Krystin's mom Pat, and Peggy & Dan. Peggy is the mom of one of Krystin's closest friends; Peggy was also very close to Krystin and she and Dan adopted Krystin's two cats when Krystin was no longer able to care for them. Peggy was the only non-family member at the hospital with us when Krystin died. Peggy is now a cancer survivor, still on medications, and there is no way we would want to risk being indoors with her (nor would she want to be). So we will gather in Pat's backyard around her firepit the day after Krystin's birthday (a day late because it will be 10 degrees warmer on Saturday than Friday). We'll all smell like smoke later, but that's OK. That's what washing machines are for.

            Elliott's birthday is November 3, so occasionally falls on election day, which it does this year. We will gather outside on our deck to celebrate; the predicted high is 60 degrees, so we can bundle up and be outdoors, at least for awhile. I am sure that several of us will be checking election returns off and on all evening.

* * *

            Finally, a question to you on a matter of no significance whatever. I had occasion to go to the doctor last week for one of my minor medical issues. When the doctor came in, she immediately asked, "How are we doing this morning?" and later posed questions such as, "Are we feeling better after I do x?" My first instinct, with that query, is to respond, "I don't know how *we* are doing but *I'm* doing well, thank you." Using "we" makes me feel like I'm a kindergartener being addressed by my teacher. (I didn't indulge my impulse to retort and just responded politely.)  Is that reaction idiosyncratic with me or does it annoy you, too?

            I hope you are all faring well during this trying period of our lives.

-- Gary

 

           

 

#80 a Facebook eruption, we are weird, empathy

 

                                                                                    Saturday, October 17, 2020

 

Good afternoon.

            It has been a challenge to write about much besides the pandemic and politics because the two of them consume so much attention (and reading, unfortunately). I will relate a story that arises from politics and then get on to a couple of unrelated but interesting (I thought) pieces. More along that line in the near future.

            I wonder if this is a sign of the fractured times. A short while ago I posted on Facebook a poem quote and an excerpt from Bloomberg.

As I contemplate the condition of the world, I must not forget Oliver Goldsmith's (or Samuel Johnson's) observation: "How small, of all that human hearts endure, that which laws or kings can cause or cure." (Thank you again Tim H for drawing this to my attention.)

And from bloomberg.com, an opinion piece on the 12 rules of life once you get to age 45. The second rule:

"Politics is not the most important thing in the world. It's just the one people talk about the most. That's because everyone shares the government; only you are married to your spouse, and can knowledgeably expound on their habit of mashing up soft-boiled egg and ketchup into a disgusting paste; this makes it hard to have much of a dialogue with your friends on the subject.

"But your spouse and others around you matter more to your happiness than the government does. You will notice, as you go about your day, that many, many important things are riding on your spouse, things that will have immediate costs and benefits to you. Very few of the things that irritate you or bring you joy have anything to do with the government. So keep some perspective about politics. It doesn't matter as much as the real people around you, and the real things you can do in the world. If you have to choose between politics and a friendship, choose the friendship every time."

(To which I'd add close friends and children.)

A Facebook (and long-time real) friend wrote "BULLSHIT" and said that was an attitude that comfortable well-off white people can have and that we are all deplorables when there is so much suffering going on because of politics.

I wrote back, via message on Facebook, not a post. "Your post on my Facebook page yesterday was beyond the pale. I deleted it. Putting BULLSHIT in caps and then insulting me and my friends (whose politics are almost all very liberal) is inappropriate for a Facebook post. I nearly unfriended you. On the content, you seem to have missed the point.  My relationships with Kathy and Elliott and my close friends are more important, in my daily life, than anything else. One must attend with care to such relationships to retain any sense of sanity, especially now. And I do not believe that admonition is limited to comfortable white people; it seems to me it's true for almost everyone everywhere. Maybe there are exceptions but I'm too tired to try to think of them." I was really mad.

She responded. "Fuck off and unfriend me. You and your 'very liberal' friends are so much worse than trump supporters. You disgust me." I thought she was a good friend, and our politics aren't even that far apart. Her reaction was almost testimony to the validity of my original post about politics and relationships. But, for the first time ever, I unfriended someone on Facebook.

I told Kathy and Elliott about this; Kathy and I talked about it and Elliott wrote to me. "Your friend's reaction and inability to even comprehend your point is exactly the attitude of millions of young people right now. The people who refused to vote for Clinton and who will refuse to vote for Biden. The people who will not stop protesting until the police are literally dismantled rather than reformed. Etc. A lot of people refuse to accept any nuance whatsoever in a political argument and they become hostile very quickly when provoked."

            This friend is someone I've known for over 40 years (from college, then a long period with no interaction, and reconnection about a dozen years ago). Kathy and I have visited this person (does not reside in Minnesota) and had a marvelous time. A caring person. So the post dumbfounded me. One reaction I had to my friend's post was that perhaps it was due to drug interaction effects (there are medical issues that require pharmaceutical use). It was so out of character. But there's not much I can do. (Kathy wrote to her separately, expressing concern, and never heard back.)

            Sigh.

* * *

            I read a New York Times book review by Daniel Dennett of The Weirdest People in the World:  How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (by Joseph Henrich). In this case, "weird" is not an insult, it's an acronym for the attributes of a group of people: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. Some time ago I read the 2010 journal article in which Henrich wrote about his work. His point was that the conclusions of many, perhaps most psychological and sociological studies of people in the U.S. and Europe cannot be generalized to other cultures and peoples. This book expands on that thesis and describes how the Europeans became WEIRD. Here is part of the abstract from the 2010 article:

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. . . . The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity.

            The book at hand is an exploration of how we became WEIRD. It all started with "Don't marry your cousin!" That's simplistic, of course, but "this simple rule triggered a cascade of changes, creating states to replace tribes, science to replace lore and law to replace custom. If you are reading this you are very probably WEIRD, and so are almost all of your friends and associates, but we are outliers on many psychological measures."

The world today has billions of inhabitants who have minds strikingly different from ours. Roughly, we weirdos are individualistic, think analytically, believe in free will, take personal responsibility, feel guilt when we misbehave and think nepotism is to be vigorously discouraged, if not outlawed. Right? They (the non-WEIRD majority) identify more strongly with family, tribe, clan and ethnic group, think more "holistically," take responsibility for what their group does (and publicly punish those who besmirch the group's honor), feel shame — not guilt — when they misbehave and think nepotism is a natural duty.

            The data from around the world seem to be pretty clear.  We WEIRD are different, although, as with much social science data, the lines are not always stark. (And they are not genetically different; it's cultural, not biological.) We developed our WEIRD status beginning perhaps 1500 years ago and at an accelerated pace in roughly the last five centuries with the rise of science and industry in Europe. Henrich says there was evolution at work—but it was cultural evolution, not biological. However, Dennett notes an example of culture affection biology:

Normal, meaning non-WEIRD, people use left and right hemispheres of their brains about equally for facial recognition, but we WEIRD people have co-opted left-hemisphere regions for language tasks, and are significantly worse at recognizing faces than the normal population. Until recently few researchers imagined that growing up in a particular culture could have such an effect on functional neuroanatomy.

            The theory is founded on certain elements of Roman Catholic Church doctrine, such as "prohibitions of polygamy, divorce, marriage to first cousins, and even to such distant blood relatives as sixth cousins, while discouraging adoption and arranged marriages and the strict norms of inheritance that prevailed in extended families, clans and tribes. 'The accidental genius of Western Christianity was in "figuring out" how to dismantle kin-based institutions while at the same time catalyzing its own spread.'" This was all an accident, of course; the Church had no idea what was going to happen.

            Here's another summary of the theory, from The Atlantic. It rests

on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species' "oldest and most fundamental institutions." Though based on primal instincts— pair-bonding, kin altruism—kinship is a social construct, shaped by rules that dictate whom people can marry, how many spouses they can have, whether they define relatedness narrowly or broadly. Throughout most of human history, certain conditions prevailed: Marriage was generally family-adjacent, which thickened the bonds among kin. Unilateral lineage (usually through the father) also solidified clans, facilitating the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of property. Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions. As families scaled up into tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms, they didn't break from the past; they layered new, more complex societies on top of older forms of relatedness, marriage, and lineage. Long story short, in Henrich's view, the distinctive flavor of each culture can be traced back to its earlier kinship institutions.

The Catholic Church changed all that. As of late antiquity, Europeans still lived in tribes, like most of the rest of the world. But the Church dismantled these kin-based societies.

Around 597 a.d., Pope Gregory I dispatched an expedition to England to convert the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent and his subjects. The leader of the mission, a monk named Augustine, had orders to shoehorn the new Christians into Church-sanctioned marriages. That meant quashing pagan practices such as polygamy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula "I do"), and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was redefining as incest. Augustine wasn't sure who counted as a relative, so he wrote to Rome for clarification. A second cousin? A third cousin? Could a man marry his widowed stepmother?

He could not. Pope Gregory wrote back to rule out stepmothers and other close kin not related by blood—another example was brothers' widows. He was lax about second and third cousins; only the children of aunts and uncles were off-limits. By the 11th century, however, you couldn't get engaged until you'd counted back seven generations, lest you marry a sixth cousin. The taboo against consanguineous family had expanded to include "spiritual kin," who were, mostly, godparents. (It went without saying that you had to marry a Christian.) Pope Gregory and Augustine's letters document a moment in a prolonged process—begun in the fourth century—in which the Church clamped down, and intermittently loosened up, on who could marry whom.

You might assume that this curious story of how the Church narrowed the criteria for marriageability would be relegated to a footnote—a very interesting footnote, to be sure—but Joseph Henrich puts the tale at the center of his ambitious theory-of-everything book.

            It's certainly a provocative theory. I haven't looked at any cross-cultural studies that examine the differences between WEIRD and other people, Europeans (and presumably their progeny in the U.S., Canada, Australia, etc.). (To be truthful, I haven't read many cross-cultural studies of anything.) Dennett commends Henrich for corralling a massive amount of data and information in support of the thesis. ("The endnotes and bibliography take up over 150 pages and include a fascinating range of discussions.")

            So we should perhaps contemplate a world where perhaps most Asians, Africans, non-European Latin Americans, and members of other non-Western cultures don't look at things the same way we do. It's hard to put myself in a different perspective. I have gone along for several decades taking the research in psychology (and related disciplines) for granted as true for all human beings. Now it appears that while the findings and conclusions might be applicable and useful in daily life, in dealing with all the other WEIRD people with whom I interact, they may not be when it comes to interacting with those from very different cultural backgrounds.

            I can only imagine the implications for international relations.

            All you native Minnesotans (and surrounding U.S. places) who have children may now legitimately and with scientific backing tell them that they are weird.

* * *

            There was a small but interesting piece of research out of Michigan State last month about empathy. The researchers were seeking to learn if people can make changes (improvements) in their personalities and to "see if -- and how -- a person could change themselves and what might be a result of their "'moral transformation.'" They

asked 414 volunteer participants to take a weekly questionnaire. Such questions included how they would react in certain situations, if they wanted to improve or change themselves, how they felt about helping others and other personality-related queries. Additionally, the researchers measured participants' "empathic concern" -- or, feelings that would arise when they saw someone in need or doing poorly. The researchers continued the weekly questionnaire for four months.

            What they learned was surprising: the more empathetic people became, the more politically liberal they became. "'We found this interesting effect where people wanted to improve on things like being more emotionally connected to others -- or, becoming more empathetic. . . . But we found that this leads to changes in their political souls as well, which maybe they weren't intending. We saw that in these personality changes toward greater empathy, people placed a lot more importance upon more liberal ideologies -- like how you should treat other people and take others' perspectives.'"

            They asked people about five moral foundations (which presumably have been identified in other studies): care, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity. "Generally, liberal and progressive people tend to prioritize two of the five moral foundations: care and fairness; whereas, conservatives draw from all five -- including the more binding foundations: loyalty to the ingroup, respect for authority, and observance of purity and sanctity standards." As people worked to become more empathetic, they also found themselves shifting to the same emphases as more liberal people, care and fairness.

            So if you're conservative and want to stay that way, you apparently don't want to become more empathetic!

* * *

            Onward further into autumn. This, for me, is the second-most depressing time of the year: we took all the plants out of the flowerpots today and put everything in the garage for the winter. The yard and gardens look barren. The geraniums and begonias were still blossoming (although looking a little sick), but with a weather forecast of off-and-on rain and snowflakes for the next week or more, we decided the time of flowers was done. But it's hard to pull up plants that still have blossoms on them. (The most depressing time is after New Year's, heading into the long dark months of winter in Minnesota.)

            I'll try to end my next epistle on a more upbeat note.

-- Gary