Study shows why we write this blog: because we’re old farts

from BBC

As per a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, BBC reports people over 30 are still blogging, and going at it with a vengeance, it seems, whereas teens prefer to just let us know what they’re doing, i.e., they prefer to post status updates on Facebook. On my part, I’m happy that all of this boredom is at least contained in a handful of sites – much like empty canvasses and silent music, I think Twitter has gone as far as one can go in the direction of minimalism in linguistic communication…

Why do poor people vote against their interests?

This article by well-known political scientist David Runciman poses this quite simple question which forms the title of this post, a question which has surely racked the brains of many an American Democrat faced with the almost infuriating response of the poor and the oppressed to proposals related to the health-care reform: barely contained violence.  The article, quoting psychologist Drew Westen, proposes that the poor Americans who can’t afford health insurance

Americans voicing their anger at the healthcare proposals at a "town hall meeting"

simply do not like being patronized by the Democrat elites, dubbed here ‘intellectual snobs’, whom they perceive as telling them what to do. This is a relatively frequent argument, which is often heard in the wake of a lost TV debate. Admittedly, the secondary explanation provided by Westen, namely that stories have a greater effect than rational and statistical discourse is more convincing (although it does not get around the problem of the value of a democracy in which all parties must rely on demagoguery to win elections). Moreover, it still does not get at the fundamental problem, which is that the most vulnerable segment of American society is not capable of seeing the advantages offered them by a change in a system which should, by rights, be blamed for their oppressed condition in the first place.

But how surprising is this attitude to the way we treat each other and the way we propose to take care of our weakest fellow-citizens? I remember being shocked to hear in the second televised presidential debate the candidate who championed health-care reform (Obama) not being capable of delivering an immediate yes or no answer to the question “Do you believe health care should be treated as a commodity?” (He eventually said it should be a right, but the question had to be asked again; most videos on YouTube show only this second part, but you can see this in the official transcript). That such a question did not deserve a simple answer from the ‘left-wing’ candidate shows how far capitalism has pushed commoditization. People in America have become so used to the notion that everything is a commodity, a phenomenon which Mészáros calls, in his exegesis of the Marxian concept of alienation, “universal saleability“. It is the reification of human relations and ultimately – the transformation of living people into things – which makes it possible to make concepts which naturally belong together appear so unnatural, so alien.

In other words, it is not because the left-leaning intellectual elites are patronizing the poor and disadvantaged masses that the latter refuse the former’s message – this is just rhetoric – it is because the people themselves have learned to view themselves and especially one another as commodities, and find social solutions distasteful. Freedom and liberty (taboo subjects) are invoked: why shouldn’t I be able to choose? (this is purchasing choice exclusively – reminding me of a poster outside the Penn campus Cereality saying “Freedom!” and, smaller: “to choose between 15 kinds of cereal!”). Why will the government impose this on me? The fragmentation of the social body into isolated individuals, each reduced to his basest particular egoistic needs and championing further the cause of privacy and individualism, is a trend which is encouraged at every step by the culture, and is another hallmark of alienation.

Given such a situation, what are the hopes for the purveyors of the humanist social message? Louis Althusser’s once opening to a guide to Marx’s Capital,

The workers who read Capital can understand it far more easily than all the bourgeois specialists however learned and eminent they may be. Why? Because Capital deals quite simply with capitalist exploitation of which they are the victims. Capital singles out and outlines the mechanisms of this exploitation, under which the workers live all their lives and of all the various forms in which the bourgeoisie realises this exploitation – increases in working hours, in productivity, in the rhythm of work, wage cuts, unemployment, etc. Capital is therefore, above all, their class bible.

now seems, unfortunately, to have been extremely naive. In fact, we can almost say with certainty that it is the most oppressed who have the smallest chances of grasping these concepts. But with a weakened and divided thinking-class, itself, as I’ve explained earlier, accepting of this alienation, the hopes of a solution are so far very faint.

Mars rover Spirit (2003–10) : Nature News

Mars rover Spirit (2003–10) : Nature News.   Space exploration, although essentially a scientific undertaking, always strikes me  as an emotionally powerful narrative.   This story of the Mars rover Sprit reminded me a little that of Wall-E.

The political taming of the modern intellectual

The New York Times recently ran this story on an interesting new study by Ethan Fosse and Neil Gross from the University of British Columbia, which cleverly sets up 6 competing hypotheses concerning the cause of the politically ‘left’/'liberal’ leanings of American professors. The NYT article concludes that academic professions are ‘typed’, in that people self-select for them in function of their already formed  identities. The way this works is much like the case of occupations such as nursing, which is ‘gender-typed’ as a ‘women’s’ profession, which, in turn, results in self-selection by gender. Thus, people who are already ‘liberal’ and ’secular’ and ‘tolerant’ end up finding themselves professors. The actual paper finds support for almost all 6 hypotheses, however, which include causes such as level of education (advanced degrees are correlated with liberal attitudes, and especially with a priori tolerance for all ideas, and, at the same time are a prerequisite for being a professor), membership to a religious group (Jews and the religiously unaffiliated are overrepresented in academia), and class (including Bourdieu’s notion of income/education disparity as a special marker for academics).

Interestingly, Bourdieu’s theory was first applied to European intellectuals, where the income disparity between business people and, say, professors is much greater than in the US, where  professors can negotiate their salaries individually depending on their ‘market value’. Bourdieu  proposed that academic intellectuals are stuck in a middle-ground (non-radical) leftist position because on the one hand they support redistributionist economic policies in a hope of equalizing the playing field with the businesspeople, but at the same time receive part of their status and income from the recognition by the latter of their cultural capital. Intellectuals thus cannot easily be communists, at least not without appearing hypocritical. To a certain extent, this situation is reversed in the US, because professors have higher salaries but the recent increasing threat of removing job security from academic life has made academic life ever less rich in cultural capital. Viewed with a Bourdieuian eye, the American professor should be ever more pushed in a tight niche at the center of the political spectrum (which, when using an international scale, means Democrat in the US). As Fosse and Gross point out,

Professors are somewhat more likely to belong to unions than are other Americans, but, contrary to the expectations of some new class theorists, they are no more likely to say they lack confidence in big business. (p.37)

I don’t know these ‘new class theorists’, but this result doesn’t surprise me at all. Some of the history cited by the authors in the background section of their paper reveals that American academics used to be far more left-leaning before the McCarthy era than either in the 60s or today, and to a higher degree embracing of specifically Marxist ideas. Here the article unfortunately mixes ‘left’ with ‘liberal’ in a manner that actually resembles the usage of these terms as interchangeable by conservative critics who hope to capitalize on a general mistrust of the ‘left’ in American popular consciousness. Unfortunately, the label of ‘liberal’ is devoid of any particular political ideology, and is of doubtful usefulness as a descriptor for the opinions of a professional class whose specialty is nuance!

Or perhaps the very vagueness of the notion of ‘liberal’, and its application as both a smear- and a self-label tells us more about the contemporary academic intellectual than one might think. My experience as an academic formerly living in the United States was that the vast proportion of my colleagues which could be classified as ‘liberal’, actually lacked an ideology, even those who were politically active, such as obsessively following an election (such as the last presidential one) or Congress debate (as with gay marriage or healthcare reform). What I mean is that there was a certain lack of political coherence in discourse and that, in fact, the leftist bogeyman of the university to which conservatives have time and again pointed, was actually, as the authors themselves show, a long list of compromises between guilt-ridden post-[insert-here-hegemony] leftist ideology and the economic desires of normalcy which describes an increasingly bourgeois mentality characterized by political torpor. By offering material advantages, the world of managers and profit-makers pushes the right button, namely on the feelings of self-loathing which intellectuals experience when faced with the contradiction between their leftist beliefs and their swelling bank accounts and round-the-clock schedules – in order to squash any radical ideas of reform. But of course this only applies to established people – as the new generation enters this system already exploited,  to  find themselves on an overcrowded job market and having to undertake unreasonable teaching loads, only to be recycled out because they are not sufficiently productive from the research point of view. Meanwhile, the few who do use their secure positions as a shield to help them critique the system are branded as crazy or conspiracy theorists, and the system carries on.

Between an intellectual war against science and reasonable critique of the neomodernism

The recent essay in NYT on the “Americanization of Mental Illness” made very interesting observations about why mental illness should be considered within the cultural context of the individual and the group,  unlike “polio” or “cancer”.   The author went on the argue that the western notions of mental illness are spreading across the world and transforming the beliefs of the “indigenous” peoples about their mental health.  He also argued that this is a very bad thing and scientists and the greed of the big pharma is to blame.

Mental illness is a complex and thoroughly intriguing issue.  Many researchers, from biomedical scientists to cultural anthropologists, have been kept awake at night to get a glimpse to the origins and reasons behind the peculiarities of the human mind.  And some came to a conclusion, as the author put it:

…These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.

This is great stuff!!!  It is honestly a fascinating and unexplored area of study.  However, from then on, I disagree with the author, who declares “science” as the main culprit:

… Mental-health professionals in the West, and in the United States in particular, create official categories of mental diseases and promote them in a diagnostic manual that has become the worldwide standard. American researchers and institutions run most of the premier scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. In addition, Western-trained traumatologists often rush in where war or natural disasters strike to deliver “psychological first aid,” bringing with them their assumptions about how the mind becomes broken by horrible events and how it is best healed. Taken together this is a juggernaut…

Yes.  It is a juggernaut.  Like many other elements of western culture, the discourse about mental illness is inevitability hegemonic.  The fact that medical research is driven by profit seeking bodies is a problem.  And, I think, like the long dismissal of Malaria or Cholera from the major biomedical research focus, just because it is not prevalent in the west, the western mental health research should be more receptive of the other forms of mental illness.  Also, I understand the worry about over-diagnosing every single behavioral difference as a psychological symptom (hence disease).  However, creating a new vogue category for mental illness that is outside of the realm of biology and hard-science is not the solution.  The author argued:

No one would suggest that we withhold our medical advances from other countries, but it’s perhaps past time to admit that even our most remarkable scientific leaps in understanding the brain haven’t yet created the sorts of cultural stories from which humans take comfort and meaning…The Western mind, endlessly analyzed by generations of theorists and researchers, has now been reduced to a batter of chemicals we carry around in the mixing bowl of our skulls.

As far as I understand, the author is arguing that we should stop trying to understand the brain, because it is too complex, almost mystical and the age-old traditions and religions are better equipped to handle the issues of the mind.  This statement does make sense if (a) if brain is a magical being separate from the body and (b) if the age-old traditions and religions are scripted by a supernatural force.  Urging the scientific community to respect other cultures and to be more observant (to be better scientist) is one thing, completely refuting scientific inquiry is another.  And the author chose exactly the latter as his argument.

A genetic change that influences brain development is a consistent situation and will create essentially the same biological problems.  This does not mean that this problem will develop or be perceived as the same way in different cultures.  The development,  treatment and reception of heart disease, cancer, HIV or Syphilis have been time and culture specific, as well.  This does not change that they were caused by a now well-understood pathogens, biological processes or genetic variants.

I will close with citing  the author one more time:

Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering.

This statement begs the answer to the question: What are those older (better?, more original?, more real?) belief systems?

Yeni keşfedilmiş bir blog – Prensese Mektuplar

Bir şekilde uzerine tıkladığım bloglardan birisi beni benden aldı.  Bizim çobanlardan iyi olmasın, ama bu arkadaşlar da sanal alemde taddan tada, alemden aleme şahane yazılar döktürüyorlar haberiniz ola.

Blogun ismi Prensese Mektuplar.

Göze çarpan girişler:

http://www.prensesemektuplar.com/2010/01/madridden-sesler.html

http://www.prensesemektuplar.com/2009/07/radikaller-icin-kurallar.html

No hope from Hope College

One of the biggest advantages of cynicism is that you get to have it both ways: call the other side “naive idealists” and at the same time, if proven wrong, you can raise your glass to the happy exception. In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton (the pen name of a professor of English at Hope College, Michigan) argues that only the following categories of people should be encouraged to apply for graduate degrees in the humanities:

• You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.
• You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.
• You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.
• You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.

Benton’s apocalyptic view of academia as both a soulless assembly-plant-like environment where worker-scholars vie for providing ’services’ to the ‘enterprise’ (university) at the lowest prices (hence replacing tenured faculty with adjuncts), and as an expensive pastime of the economic upper-classes is strikingly jarring and ultimately, itself naive. The author, having correctly identified that the mix of reasons given by most undergraduates seeking admission to graduate schools is unrealistic and may lead to serious disappointments later in the course of study, makes the error of assuming that the decision to apply or not should be governed by the applicant’s ability to eliminate those concerns. So, if you want to study medieval French poetry because there is a recession and you don’t think you can get a different job (and the implication is a real job in the real world), then you should only apply if you can afford not to get a job. This takes out of the equation the idea that academia is not meant to be what so many institutions have tried and continue to force it to be:  a profession like any other, with a training and a body of knowledge /skills which goes with the diploma, and a job-placement market where demand is met with supply. Research is an open-ended process which is fundamentally different from any other kind of intellectual activity and training – and for that matter, it is different from all other ‘products’. Demand for research is completely culturally-determined, which means it changes from generation to generation – but the supply of talent is likely to be distributed equally across generations. This means that people’s interests and affinities cannot always match the demand – and it is naive to ask them to. This does not change the fact that research has always been and will always be fundamentally difficult, and those engaging in it should know that they are embarking upon a quest that will require their full dedication. It is in this sense that going to graduate school in order not to leave school or because of a recession is naive – one should do something as serious as this only to satisfy the desire to answer questions about some issue. Arguing that one should not do it unless one has a backup for failure is like saying one should not get married unless one can afford losing one’s house in the divorce or unless one has a lover on the side!

I am not disputing the abysmal state of affairs which governs the contemporary university, and which is aptly described by Benton. But I find his resignation distressing, especially coming from someone who has remained in academe despite its shortcomings.  Finally, I find his solution naive. Even in the last three-four hundred years, when the question of obtaining the means to lead an honorable life while engaged in the travails of science or the arts was much less one of following a set of relatively standard rules, and much more dependent upon the sheer luck of finding an aristocratic patron, even then, still the vast majority of important scientists and artists came from modest backgrounds, and struggled to make ends meet. In a certain sense, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

2020 visions – Nature

There is a great set of opinions in the last issue of journal Nature, called 2020 visions, setting up some of the challenges and promises of the next decade.

Overall, I think, people merge on three major issues that will shape the intellectual realm in the next ten years:  (1) Sorting out information (what is good, what is bad and who decides, (2) The massive boom in the biotechnologies, in particular economic, ethical and scientific concerns, (3) the limitations of over-specialization and ways to find new ways of  synthesizing ideas

I want to highlight some of the predictions that relates to my research and thinking:

Peter Norvig declares:

One big challenge for search engines is to implement a measure of quality that is not based solely on popularity. Search engines must determine both relevance (is the item pertinent to the user’s query?) and quality (is the item inherently accurate, useful and understandable, independent of the query?). Current relevance measures do reasonably well. Measures of quality require better models of the concepts and relations expressed in documents and how they relate to the reality of the world, as well as models of the trustworthiness of authors.

David Relman hails the emerging understanding of the human body as an ecosystem and refers to the microbiome as “our extended selves”.

David B. Goldstein, who I have had the chance to meet couple of times this year points out the challenges of finding the genetic determinants of disease:

Two striking findings will define the study of disease for the decade to come. First, common genetic variation seems to have only a limited role in determining people’s predisposition to many common diseases. Second, gene variants that are very rare in the general population can have outsized effects on predisposition.

Daniel R. Weinberger also mentions genomics, but in the context of psychological disease:

Psychiatric research is poised to realize Sigmund Freud’s dream of a biological psychology, but it will require new applications of old thinking

Leslie C. Aiello complains about the lack of a comprehensive hominin fossil record from Asia:

Fossil hunting is a high-risk venture and expeditions may not always produce the desired results. However, the number of new hominin species discovered in Africa and Europe in the recent past suggests that a similar effort in Asia would not go unrewarded.

George Church, with whom we have published a recent paper, also talks about the ultra-fast developments in genomics and aims high:

In the past decade, the cost of reading and writing DNA has dropped a million-fold, outstripping even Moore’s law for exponentially increasing computer power. The challenge for the next decade will be to integrate molecular engineering and computing to make complex systems. The development of engineering standards for biological parts, such as how pieces of DNA snap together, will permit computer-aided design (CAD) at levels of abstraction from atomic to population scales. Biologists will have access to tools that will allow them to arrange atoms to optimize catalysis, for example, or arrange populations of organisms to cooperate in making a chemical.

John L. Hennessy, the current president of Stanford University, paints a rather darker picture as he warns us about the possible budget cuts:

As financial pressures increase, institutions may be forced to make difficult decisions — prioritizing areas in which they have sufficient existing strength or student interest and collaborating with peer institutions that have greater capability in other fields. Continuing support for fledgling cross-disciplinary efforts in difficult financial circumstances will require vigilance.

Richard Klausner and David Baltimore criticizes the current state of NIH and suggest major changes:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) serves the US biomedical community by providing resources for experimentation, but it does so in ways that bias the enterprise towards short-range and unimaginative thinking…

One of the most important suggestions that they make is about research funding:

funding criteria will put more weight on judgements about the individual who is applying, not the details of the proposed project. It is creative minds that we want to foster, and when the NIH identifies someone who has been innovative and productive, that person should be adequately supported so they can express their creativity in their own way.

Missing the field!

The summer of 2006, Central Turkey.

I took a bus that went from one very small city to another.   Roughly in the midpoint of this bus ride, I got off the bus trusting the detailed map of the area I bought from Istanbul.  The bus left me on the side of the highway that cuts through vast wheat crops that feed the country.  I took a very small path that goes perpendicular to the highway.  I hoped that it would lead me to a small village that I was told to be the oldest in the area, and where one of the earliest Neolithic settlements in the world reside.

I was alone…  It was a lonely 2 hour walk.   It was hot, uncomfortable, slightly terrifying and unpredictable.   But, I remember, still with a slight tingle in my stomach, the emergence of odd hills with man-made caves and paintings on them.  Ancient churches, I was told later.  And, of course, the paintings of Turkish flags and slogans glorifying the Turkish army scattered on the sides of these hills.

That walk is in such a contrast to my everyday walk from home to the ever-busy Longwood Campus  in the snowy and cold streets of Boston.  I miss it sometimes: The unpredictability, looking at things that other people do not care to look, get to places that other people would not go.  The loneliness.

Man vs. Nature

U started an insightful series of comments on the “We are primates  all the way down“, which I want to elaborate on.

The premise of the initial article was simple:  We are very similar to primates in our behavior and thinking.  In other words, I wanted to state that we are nothing more than the brainy apes, which coming from an evolutionary biologists, also represent a critique of human arrogance, and if you stretch it a little, the breaking of mind and soul dichotomy (i.e., the soul is an extension of a complex network of neurons).  One of the good examples of this idea in my social circle is the writings of Ferhat Kaya in his blog Evrimsel Koken.

However, U made it clear that this view, even it is accurate, does not suffice to accurately address the political problems.  He wrote:

I’ve just read the article attached to this picture. Although it is certainly touchy and reminds us of the deficiencies of the ‘homo sapiens-centered’ worldview, the reaction of the photographer in the interview takes an equally misleading direction: to bring about an image of animals, as if they are human beings.

Look at this quotation: “After a hunter killed her mother, Dorothy was sold as a “mascot” to an amusement park in Cameroon. For the next 25 years she was tethered to the ground by a chain around her neck, taunted, teased, and taught to drink beer and smoke cigarettes for sport. In May 2000 Dorothy—obese from poor diet and lack of exercise—was rescued and relocated along with ten other primates”.

It is as if we talk about a human being. I don’t see anything wrong to have a deep sympathy for the animals suffering from the cruelty of human beings. However, that suffering doesn’t turn them into human beings.

The inherent problem in this attitude is in the deficiency of turning the environmental catastrophy we experience into a set of isolated problems. Chimpanzees are very cute. They look like, act like, and even think like human beings at some level. But, then, what about caterpillars and birds sharing the same forest?

In order to ’save the rainforest’, this photographer should be ready to consume less. She should be used to subsisting on food that is not produced without excessive use of energy. As long as she buys food, one calorie of which is produced by spending ten calories, it is no wonder that the ecological system is so damaged.

And, of course, I even won’t go to the embeedded ‘colonialism’ here. People in Cameroon are so horrible that they even pay to see a chimpanzee be tortured. Another detail in this picture is the African guy carrying the body (manual labor), while the European-looking woman sitting and mourning (emotions).

Monkeys are monkeys. Human beings are human beings. By presenting them more like human beings, we do not make a positive contributions to our problems, which in one way or another cause their problems.

This is a very important critique and I am still confused about how to answer that.  One immediate response, of course, is that you have to pick your fights, and a complete holistic war against inequality is bound to fail.  This, however, is not a good answer as U points out in a later comment:

That’s the challenge, yet that fact that it’s a challenge does not justify the attittude in this article.

Nature-society relationship has been at the core of the previous modes of production, as it still is for the capitalist mode of production: just looking at the history within the last two centuries (colonization, world wars, and recent crisis about peak oil should account for satisfactory examples) justifies this point.

Maybe a useful starting point is to evade the way many formulate the question as the ‘nature-man’ or ‘nature-human’ interaction. No, it’s the very distinction that emerged at some point in the pre-historical ages of humanity as a result of the transformation of the social formations as webs of relations that act independently of what we call today ‘nature’.

Let me rephrase this: if we talk about ‘nature’, we already talk about the mind-boggling unity of all ‘things’ outside the human society. There, we pretend as if we deal with a simple phenomenon. We act and think as if there is no ‘bigger picture’.

However, when we talk about society, then the question of ‘big picture’ immediately kicks in.

Nature does not have a big picture. Nor is it the big picture. There are monkeys, cute and peaceful whales, and trees. Also maybe bananas and some African tribes. The collection of these eclectical (and extremely deragotary for those tribes) picture is the only picture that we have whenever we think of nature.

But it is somehow the biggest challenge to insert any society-related concern into this equation, since it requires us understand ‘the big picture’.

Why is nature taken as such an ‘easy’ subject, while why do we abstain so much from talking about the actual social interactions that are primarily responsible for the tragedy in this picture?

Very simple: since, if we go there, this mourning and completely innocent woman should rethink her job there and what she is doing there. Then, she should question her position and relationship with that guy carrying the monkey.

I think biology and molecular/physical anthropology partially contributes to this theoretical lethargy thanks to their methods to handle the nature as an entity independent from society in the first place.

But to come up with a fully-fledged criticism of the methodological matters of these disciplines is certainly a job beyond my knowledge…

I will end it here for now.  Expect some more writing about this issue in the coming weeks.  Good stuff!