https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-covid-capitulation?s=w

(RE) I can personally say that the past several weeks have involved multiple sick contacts and close friends or family contracting COVID. I also think that my social circle is more prone to this as many of these people were early recipients of each dose and booster and employed more stringent protective measures than the average citizen with no known prior infections. When each of these people became infected I worried for them, but knew that they would likely be okay and all of them have faired through the infection with mild to moderate symptoms lasting for 3-4 days. I do not want other people to have these worries and experiences. But the position that Dr. Topol proposes our society take with respect to novel and emerging strains of covid is untenable.

"While the policy of zero Covid is untenable with Omicron, as we’ve seen abandoned in many countries such as New Zealand, Australia, and Taiwan, we should adopt the new policy of Zero Covid Deaths."

Novel strains with immune escape from vaccine-induced antibodies aren't anybody's dream. But the background population of Americans that is either vaccinated against or has natural immunity from a past infection is likely well over 80% of the population. While they may be open to infection with a novel strain, their immune responses will be much more competent to fend off the new relative. Even then, for some people, this won't be enough and they will in fact succumb to an acute episode of COVID. But this is the nature of being a biological organism in communication with other organisms. We have diagnostics, treatments, and a strong ability to care for and create additional protections for vulnerable populations. Every tool we could ask for, we have some version of at present.

To do more than this, to hinder the social, economic, or educational goals of millions of Americans for the pursuit of a "zero-covid-deaths" policy is just as unworkable as a "zero-covid" platform. This problem is also inherent to our medical systems’ complexity and reporting systems. People die in hospitals. People get covid. Some of the people who will die in hospitals will also die with or from covid. As long as this virus exists and circulates in our society, there will be people to fall into these buckets.

"...But well beyond the use of boosters and vaccines, and easy, rapid access to Paxlovid, we absolutely need an aggressive stance to get ahead of the virus—for the first time since the pandemic began—instead of surrendering."

This is not surrendering, Dr. Topol. This is what winning will look like.

_

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/search-long-covid

(RE) This writeup is very valuable and comes from one of the first large NIH studies looking for biomarkers and neurocognitive signs of long-covid in a longitudinal population. Take it from Derek Lowe:

"As mentioned, this is an ongoing study, but so far there are no diagnostic findings that would allow you to even say for sure that post-Covid even exists, biochemically. The authors certainly don't put it that way, but I will."

I've discussed briefly my experience working in a long-term follow-up clinic for ICU patients where the entire faculty I worked with expressed hesitation around the organic nature of long-covid. Paired with the french JAMA study showing that the strongest indicator for having long covid was a belief in having contracted COVID rather than actually having had covid, my priors surrounding this diagnosis are more solidified in their current form.

-

Psychedelics as anti-inflammatory agents

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30102081/

(RA w/ skimming) A member of my lab group has a particular interest in the use of psychedelics as more systemic anti-inflammatory and anti-anxiety medications from a biochemical premise. Hypothesizing that psychedelics decrease average peak cortisol levels and other inflammatory biomarkers.

This paper focuses on the utilization of 5-HT2a receptor agonists as possible anti-inflammatory medications. A similar pathway to this mechanism would be the SSRIs, which beyond their use in psychiatric medicine also have certain applications in palliative care for those with chronic pain syndromes. I've always assumed that this had more to do with a knock-on effect from lowering basal anxiety levels which manifest as chronic pain in these patients. But perhaps the increased levels of serotonergic signaling, including at the 5-HT sites, is the mechanistic explanation for this effect. 

Developmental Science:

https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/29766/118998/Longitudinal-Associations-Between-Parenting-and

(RA, skimmed discussion and data) Big 5 personality traits, while very heritable, are not influenced by variation in parenting style. This is one additional node in the network of studies that have gone towards alleviating my pre-parental stresses. I'm confident that I will be able to put my children into environments and peer groups that will allow them to maximize whatever potential they possess and protect them from insults that may inhibit this development. I feel a great sense of uncertainty when I consider what actual interventions I would institute within my household to increase any specific trait or capacity in my progeny.

-

Random:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/20/22893041/saturn-death-star-underground-ocean-nasa-moon

(RE) How many nukes does it take to get through 14-20 miles of ice?

_

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-ancient-greek-astronomical-calculation-machine-reveals-new-secrets/

(RE)

"Price’s model was my introduction to the Antikythera mechanism. My first paper, in fact, “Challenging the Classic Research,” was a comprehensive demolition of most of Price’s proposed gearing structure for the machine."

How much science progresses simply by developing new tools that allow finer resolution imaging of internal structures? That's some nice groundbreaking work you've got there, would be a shame if someone were to, I don't know, invent hierarchical phase-contrast CT and disprove all of your hypotheses just by looking at some images.

Still, a large and humbling amount of work remained for these researchers to finish this Archimedean puzzle. The level of complexity contained within this object is astounding for a ~200B.C. tool. Multiple levels of gearing with 1mm teeth and the ability to calculate the moon's phase, position, and epicyclic positioning while also tracking the sun and the five nearest planetary bodies. They hypothesize that Archimedes was the inventor of this tool with some historical literature to back up the claim; not bad for a guy who is occasionally the butt of jokes for being remembered by history for noticing that his bathwater rose when he sat in it.

I'm sure that finer imaging and unearthed literature will eventually provide new insights into further possible applications of this tool. But it should definitely give you pause when considering what was and wasn't possible in the long past.

Medicine:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1300625

(RE)

In the list of studies where the results could be replaced with the phrase, "Our results show exactly what you would have predicted." It's still nice to have this data on hand though. While the rates of complication, morbidity, and mortality are all relatively low here, it is very notable that having a low-rated surgeon can nearly double your rate of these events.

An add-on here is the length of operations by ranking,

"The lowest quartile of skill was also associated with longer operations (137 minutes vs. 98 minutes, P<0.001) and higher rates of reoperation (3.4% vs. 1.6%, P=0.01) and readmission (6.3% vs. 2.7%) (P<0.001)."

A good rule of thumb is that you want to spend as little of your life hospitalized or under general anesthesia as possible. Recent studies on the neurocognitive complications from being put under

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782851

and the general risk of iatrogenic infection while in a post-operative care wards would be my primary driver rather than strictly the moderate decreases in relative risk of mortality during an operation.

Technology:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/07/20/homomorphic.html

(RE)

Just as a prior presentation led to me reading and writing slightly more about Optogenetics, a new presentation will be taking us down some rabbit holes related to homomorphic cryptography, federated machine/deep learning, and some other computational science work. I read this essay from Vitalik when it was first released and it inspired the seeds that are now germinating into the upcoming talk. I still lack the foundational mathematical or cryptographic knowledge to really grok how applicable the systems he describes here are to real-world problems in their current stage of development. My plan is to gain that understanding. Feel free to send recommendations on these topics.

_

Voila! In this video, Kristin Lauter of Microsoft Research describes an already available package for homomorphic encryption on large data sets using ML pipelines. Accessible here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/microsoft-seal/

-   

Culture:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade.html

(RE)

Prepare yourself, the culture war has found new fuel to keep its inferno raging. With Politico reporting a supreme court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and push the decision to regulate abortions back to the state level each side is bound to stir up a wild pot of unhinged fear-mongering and victory pandering.

In this battle, I fall far to the progressive end of the distribution such that all decisions regarding healthcare should be between an individual and their provider with the state playing as little a role as possible. That any state could tell an adult individual what medical decisions they make in their own lives seems antithetical to the type of society I'd like to live in. However, very few people would like to live in my utopian vision anyways, so let's get back down to our own green earth here.

Looking at Pew data on abortion opinions by state. From popular opinion, it seems like ~13 states have pluralities that would vote in favor of restricting abortion access with a few close calls strewn throughout. It's also worth noting that on a national scale 37% of women are in favor of abortion being illegal in most or all cases. The distribution of this opinion follows those 13 state boundaries just mentioned. That the sexes split so similarly along these lines would surprise my latte liberal comrades who seem convinced that this opinion is solely the function of ‘old white men trying to restrict women’. What does it mean that actual democratic lawmaking may result in several states with severe or complete restrictions? While that does terrify me, I also feel the nagging pull of the endless warnings about, "Our Democracy in Peril".

This is an intrinsically difficult topic. My hope is that this decision leads to a more firmly planted protection of healthcare dignity for women in all of their healthcare decisions. Many champions of abortion rights have expressed concerns about the stability and legitimacy of the arguments ratified in Roe. Now comes the time for us to once again find our political resolve and search out those silver linings to this situation. One benefit is that this is the first time I've truly given deep thought to the topic. Sure, I've listened to podcasts and read articles and all the normal stuff. But I've always done this investigation with the safety net of a supreme court ruling to cozy my mind and anxieties. For the first time, I am actually now deeply thinking about what the best format for these protections would be. Intellectual games have now become reality and I would hope that this serves to sharpen all of our thinking in the efforts to develop more secure and well-founded protection for other'’ healthcare choices.

_

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin

(RE)

This may be one of my favorite profiles I've read recently. Not because I find anything particularly grabbing or entrancing about neo-reactionary politics or Yarvin as an individual, but because of Jacob Siegel's navigation of the topics. Generally, these ideas and political initiatives are anathema to my personal beliefs. Still, I want the information I receive on them to be presented in a manner that is actually educational and creates space for understanding why someone may find them valuable. This allowed me to actually take on their perspective and work out my own personal points of difference and strengthened my own positions against these alternatives. Many of the foundational concerns and observations that neo-reactionary politics point to are things that I also labor some concern over. Seeing how these similar concerns breed differing solutions and what light lies between them felt like a breath of fresh journalistic air.

This profile is an excellent example of how engaging with well-presented arguments that stand in opposition to your beliefs is beneficial. Profile journalists take note.

Random:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/

(RE)

If I'm going to be writing more, and especially writing more in public, then I want to sharpen this skill of mine until it's a barely lethal fine point. SSC and its new format at ACX are a big inspiration for me in starting the FHux initiative. We'll see if I can incorporate his advice in my future works. My apologies for rule #10 likely holding true.

_

The Architecture of John Lautner:

https://www.google.com/search?q=John+Lautner&sxsrf=ALiCzsZgaqieunGetJzkeDHWpIt4Jg8vZw:1651614908099&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi3q5z_qMT3AhXkKkQIHYcQC3IQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&cshid=1651614945739540&biw=1512&bih=777&dpr=2

I have aspirations to live in a house that feels and functions as art integrated into its environment. The work of Frank Loyd Wright always resonated with me as does the work of John Lautner who studied under Wright. Lautner's work possibly speaks to me even deeper than that of Wright's, something about the curved space of his homes and varied levels interwoven within each project’s resting site. An integration of this style with the organic forms of Zaha Hadid would be my ideal. Do recommend similar work.

_

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/MD-06-2021-0747/full/html

(RA w/ some skimming)

This supports arguments I've seen from Aella regarding the benefit of cosmetic surgeries. A single use of a filter may increase your likelihood of landing an interview, but actually modifying your body will carry through to every aspect of your life. Grocery stores, car dealerships, people on the street, etc... all would benefit from exploiting the attractiveness bias in your favor. I judge myself to be moderately attractive and probably benefit from this function in many ways that I am unaware of. I am also a strong proponent of self-confidence in appearance and value no matter how you look. How much of this disposition is correlated with my being on the winning end of this distribution?

My pro-self-positivity position, I would guess, is strongly connected to my not having extensive experience on the 'losing' end of this distribution. My pro-cosmetic surgery position feels like it stems from some type of genuine desire for others to find success and confidence within themselves.

I don't find it inconsistent to hold both of these positions.

∞

Medicine:

(RA w/ Skimming)

Schmidt, Barbara, et al. "Caffeine therapy for apnea of prematurity." New England Journal of Medicine 354.20 (2006): 2112-2121.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16707748/

Imagine, if you will, an array of NICU baby pods. Each with its own little cafe inhabitant arguing over the true meaning of modern artistic movements. Writing their little manuscripts. Slowly stirring in creme as the coffee goes cold and the mind busies itself reading nonsensical screes of social demands on the corkboard.

That's not what it's like at all. But it's what I will continue to imagine Caffeine therapy for premature infants is like.

-

(RE)

Matta, Joane, et al. "Association of Self-reported COVID-19 Infection and SARS-CoV-2 Serology Test Results With Persistent Physical Symptoms Among French Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic." JAMA internal medicine 182.1 (2022): 19-25.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832

I had a pediatric patient with long-covid who had a mother with long-covid and both of them had sky-high levels of anxiety. The care team I was working with wouldn't go so far as to say that all of their long-covid patients were functional or psychopathological, but they at one point directly mentioned it likely being similar to chronic Lyme and arising in the same patient populations.

This child had been completely isolated from the outside world and even this week was too petrified to take his mask off during a physical exam with a room full of entirely vaccinated and N95 masked adults for fear of contracting covid again. At this point, his condition is less the result of some post-viral syndrome and more a psychosocial delay caused by social isolation, physical inactivity, and instilled fear of the outside world from his mother. The most effective thing we could do for him would be a referral to physical therapy in addition to CBT with some type of exposure therapy included. But his family was not of the mind that his symptoms could be explained in any way that didn't directly stem from his latent viral syndrome and so they wouldn't listen to those recommendations.

When I first saw this paper, I prepared for an onslaught of discrediting statements or arguments as to why we should still greatly fear the knock-on effects of an acute covid illness, even an asymptomatic one. Instead, there was nothing. This paper only reached me due to another student and I discussing long covid and our thoughts that its constellation of symptoms was well fitting for those, “chronic mystery syndrome” patients. Sure, it got some traffic, but nowhere near as much as articles purveying fear of what long covid may do to you or someone you love.

I’m still unsure what to think of this syndrome. My brief time working with a team that focuses on long-term pediatric ICU recovery had me updating more toward the explanation provided in this study. Scott Alexander has a good post detailing this issue if you want more.

- (RE)

Tremblay, S., Acker, L., Afraz, A., Albaugh, D. L., Amita, H., Andrei, A. R., ... & Platt, M. L. (2020). An open resource for non-human primate optogenetics. Neuron, 108(6), 1075-1090.

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(20)30751-0?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627320307510%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

I appreciate the model of open science here, especially in a field developing so rapidly and with such diverse possible applications.

- (RTP)

Optogenetic manipulation of an ascending arousal system tunes cortical broadband gamma power and reveals functional deficits relevant to schizophrenia

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-020-0840-3

-

(RA w/ skimming)

Hadjiabadi, D., Lovett-Barron, M., Raikov, I. G., Sparks, F. T., Liao, Z., Baraban, S. C., ... & Soltesz, I. (2021). Maximally selective single-cell target for circuit control in epilepsy models. Neuron, 109(16), 2556-2572.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0896627321004220

This is a great example of a model for using optogenetics to identify effective targets for therapies.

Economics:

(RE)

It's the stupidity, stupid (Scott Sumner)

https://www.econlib.org/its-the-stupidity-stupid/

I think stupidity here is only a proxy for some other thing. Sure, you can list out a series of commonplace intuitions of the contemporary elite that are actually self-defeating or just flat-out wrong; but those people are not wrong because they are stupid. What I think Scott is gesturing at here is an emergent stupidity that is coursing over our society. I don't have a good explanation for this, but I have found Haidt's analysis fairly convincing. Less so his concerns surrounding social media's impacts on wellness and more so its impacts on our emergent hive-mind.

I've also found myself looking at the current world and wondering, "Is society collapsing in a self-involved black hole of stupidity?" and assumed that I must be overreacting to things. Some of the initiations have been silly things like watching Megan Thee Stallion's Coachella performance with almost zero effort at hiding her lip-syncing, terrible mid-set college hip-hop nightclub DJ during a costume change, and endless songs about pussy. Other triggers have been maneuvering my city and seeing the homelessness problem storm on unabated and terribly addressed by the city council. I've been trying to figure out why I feel like such an old cranky stooge. Troubles for another day.

Random:

(RE)

The Mystery of the Miracle Year - Dwarkesh Patel

https://dwarkeshpatel.com/annus-mirabilis/

Knowing about the miracle year in the lives of many scientists and other creative professionals created a time-bomb of anxiety within me. Sure, I don't have any plans to become the next Von Neumann or reveal any novel paradigms that will shift the nature of the world. But are the most productive and creative years of my life really around me in this current moment or lying near me in my unretrievable past? Even if I will not change the world, this is a difficult thought to carry around.

The final paragraph of this essay describes the goal of liberating smart mid-20-something people from otherwise time-demanding responsibilities of life to generate the maximum number of 'annus-mirabilis' possible. This is certainly not the structure of many PhD programs as Dwarkesh observes and it is certainly not the nature of current medical programs as I could attest. But how else am I, or any other young professional, then supposed to acquire the necessary training to explore and expand these cognitive landscapes? I cant' simply think of new psychiatric medications or therapies and then institute them without the resources and certifications provided by passing through these corridors of education.  Nor do I think I would want to. Maybe this is just an argument for specialized training earlier in life and a more liberalized primary education; both of which I would fully support. But really what I would like is to get my current training completed and then have a wide-open explorative space to innovate.

Oddly, I do feel like undergraduate education is not far from what Dwarkesh is describing here. I'd say that my most externally productive years were when I was an active participant in several internationally focused and locally active service groups and social organizations. I was able to fill my time pursuing my personal interests, join research labs, open new clubs, and host meetings for young and generally free minds on whatever topics I felt compelled to. So perhaps the question should really be why more undergraduate students are not manifesting 'annus mirabilis' for themselves within these environments? Maybe it's more of a cultural function that students are not leveraging these opportunities to their fullest extents. That their role at the university is that of a consumer rather than a co-creative partner. This seems like an easier parameter to modify than fully reshaping how we currently envisage young adulthood.

-

(RE)

1 Billion North Americans!

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/the-yuxi-circle-the-worlds-most-densely-populated-area/?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter

I'm fully on track with Matthew Yglesias's One Billion Americans Argument, but this figure mapping out various 4,000km circles and attempting to maximize the population living within each one caught me quite off guard. With a central point of Mexico City, the 4,000km circle that contains basically the entire populated region of North and Central America only adds up to 0.73 billion humans. I'm currently reading Jared Diamond's Gun's Germ's & Steel and find its arguments relating the population density of a region as centrally important to its global competitiveness well-fitting with similar arguments from Edward Glaeser & Paul Romer's work on endogenous growth theory being exponentially driven by population density. Sure, 1 Billion Americans. But first, let's get ourselves comfortably above 1 billion North Americans.

• AlphaCode (RE)

https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-alphacode

I know that I pointed to this last week, but it's been sitting on my desktop and I've gone back through it again. I feel like the impact of unlocking coding capacities for those without the technical capabilities are untold. The types of challenges that were tackled by this model are highly practical and something that even non-CS intense fields would benefit from utilizing.

• DALL-E 2 (RE)

  https://openai.com/dall-e-2/

  https://twitter.com/sama/status/1511724264629678084

  https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512935787943374855

  https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512666008846229506

  https://blog.samaltman.com/dall-star-e-2

This development in high-quality directed art generation via AI seems like a huge jump. Similar to the developments from Deepmind's coding division, another key 'human' domain seems quickly at risk of being eaten by computers. Sure, human-generated art will always hold particular value to both the creator and consumer of art. But if you need a quick, original, and high-quality illustration that conveys the general meaning of a string of words (say like the images attached to blog posts/book covers) then this flooding of the market space will be an unreckonable force.

Sam Altman has a good point about how the order of disruption relating to AI products is running oppositely to how we predicted it would. Physical labor has proven very difficult for AI to automate as we once feared while creative work and cognitive labor seem to be well within the range of various technologies. I still think that this will mostly enhance the thinking and functioning of the fields which it is possibly disrupting. And those individuals are likely the best suited for applying these new technologies in effective and creative ways. But it's still an interesting risk to play with.

I'd love to get access to GPT-3 & DALL-E 2. Eventually, I'll plug away at getting to explore these tools.

Medicine:

• Sahel, J. A., Boulanger-Scemama, E., Pagot, C., Arleo, A., Galluppi, F., Martel, J. N., ... & Roska, B. (2021). Partial recovery of visual function in a blind patient after optogenetic therapy. Nature Medicine, 27(7), 1223-1229. (RA w/ skimming)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01351-4

• Lu, Y., Brommer, B., Tian, X., Krishnan, A., Meer, M., Wang, C., ... & Sinclair, D. A. (2020). Reprogramming to recover youthful epigenetic information and restore vision. Nature, 588(7836), 124-129. (RA w/ skimming)

  I'll be doing some deep diving into mechanisms to either regenerate or modulate pathologic nervous tissue for an upcoming project. These two papers are likely to form the bases of my report, the first being the utilization of optogenetic therapies in clinical applications and the second involving epigenetic modifications to restore tissues function. These are two technologies that are in the incubatory stage of development for clinical applications, but both strike me as highly promising for neurodegenerative illnesses. The difficult part of adult neurology is that you're mostly diagnosing individuals at their relative high points. There is no going back up the hill of functionality. We can try to keep you where you're at for a while, but eventually, you will lose ground. And then you will lose more.

  These technologies and other similar developments in the field make it so that this may no longer be the case in 10 to 20 years.

• Mukhopadhyay, M. (2022). Tracing cell relationships. Nature methods, 19(1), 27-27. (RE)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-021-01370-6

On the way to mapping out our unicellular --> multicellular development. I've seen prior work exploring this field with somewhat high fidelity mappings, but recent developments in whole genome sequencing, small interfering RNA particles, and CRISPR editing platforms should yield even more understanding with an eye towards modification and programming.

Economics:

• Holden, R., & Malani, A. (2021). Can blockchain solve the hold-up problem in contracts?. Cambridge University Press. (RA, with deeper skimming)

  https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP_No.2018-12.pdf

It seems like this paper’s title and abstract answer the question almost instantly. What I think is underappreciated throughout the paper is that resolving hold-up problems in these contracts is highly valuable due to the sheer number of contract executions necessitated by the current technological landscape. The current limitation on high speed transactions with limited friction and high trust in blockchain is the transactions per second limitation currently being attacked by several crypto projects. Sure, large scale contracts should be developed using smart contracts for execution, security, and trust. But allowing these three characteristics to all eventual digital goods transactions is the real payoff for the average person.

• Karnataka Hospital Insurance Experiment (RE)

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/12/karnataka-hospital-insurance-experiment.html

Once again, this sequence of studies and their relevant findings are rather negative with respect to my career field and that of every other person who I interact with on a weekly basis. What types of interventions in healthcare then become appropriate to subsidize or support at a social scale? Just emergency room to hospitalizations? Or only preventative? If these papers are to be believed, do preventative medicine and annual screening actually end up doing anything for health on average? Maybe, 'on average' isn't the important thing here.

• Building from the Ground Up: Reclaiming the American Housing Boom (RE)

https://www.mercatus.org/publications/urban-economics/building-ground-reclaiming-american-housing-boom

The reconceptualization of the housing crises is another thing I'd like to explore more as I enter the phase of my life where large scale loans (beyond the near $300k I'm taking out for school) become an actual part of my life. How does an individual operating rationally in a system that is apparently in fact 'not a bubble' still suffer the negative consequences of that hallucinatory bubble popping?

Random:

https://nypost.com/2022/04/04/us-warship-was-chased-by-two-car-sized-balls-of-light-ufos/

(RE)

Obviously, treat the source hesitation, but this would fit with a pattern of otherwise validated observations from much more trustworthy sources. I still regularly mention the 60 minutes episode on this and the related reporting to much surprise. I think this and recent AI advances are two of the most underrated phenomenon in contemporary culture.

There’s a secret blessing and cursing within your life that you’ve probably noticed before. The things you always thought you wanted, when and if you finally got them, eventually lost the fresh flavor of self-fulfillment. Your daily life probably contains, subjectively, a similar amount of stress and folly as it did before you got that promotion, or new car, or even just fixed that sticky door lock that you hated so much. The opposite is also true. Life is marked by many great periods of personal tragedy. The loss of one’s parents, the passing of dear pets, the end of friendships. Each of these eventually loses their sense of overwhelming personal sadness. Your daily life probably contains, subjectively, a similar amount of upsetting moments and depressed moods as it did before each of these events happened in your life*.  This function of our psychology is known as, “Hedonic Adaptation” and its implications are fairly profound and valuable to the average person. These lessons undergird many philosophies and religious ideas, particularly those of eastern meditative practices.

There’s an unfortunate nature to the self-propelling momentum of organizations and institutions. No one organization sets out in its charter the goals that once achieved would mean that the organization has no more reason to continue existing. There’s a survival instinct that results in the pivoting towards new territory or the adoption of loftier goals, this of course necessitates that the organization, and the professional positions that compose it, have reason to continue breathing. This also has a fun name, “Mission Creep” a, “gradual or incremental expansion of an intervention, project or mission, beyond its original scope, focus or goals, a ratchet effect spawned by initial success.”**

This function of our institutions and organizations and its implications are fairly profound and valuable to the average person. These lessons undergird many economic, political, and religious philosophies (is there a difference?) and have resonance with the current state of many contemporaneous organizations.

The hypothesis here is that these two functions are the same operation being called on a different substrate. The first, within our own minds and deeply personal to our lives. The second, within the institutional bodies that dictate much of how your life operates and what is required and enabled of you during your time here on this planet. The function itself is a simple adaptation to the new normal as a baseline. It would be easy to claim that this is what allows for our catastrophic mindsets despite the broad spectrum of measurements that should inspire optimism in everyone about how great the current moment is to live in for more people than ever before. That we are pessimistic because it is in our nature to eventually return to our hedonic set points no matter what novel improvements may come. And that it is this subjective feeling that inspires those organizations which helped bring about some of these recent increases in well-being to say, “so what should we pivot to next?” and suddenly there’s a whole new world of things to have concern over with no real feasible endpoint. A Lucretian javelin of social progress.

II. What to do About It

There are lessons from the literature on hedonic adaptation that might serve as guiding lights for organizations and social movements to produce longer-lasting and more rewarding outcomes. These have less to do with giving up the idea of seeking out achievements because they’ll just go stale after a few years of normalcy and more to do with seeking out the right type of achievements and then instituting systems around them so that we avoid the amnesic components of adaptation.

If you spend much time around meditators or self-help enthusiasts, you’ll eventually hear about how your attention is the most valuable resource you have. In fact, they’ll state, that it is the key determinant of your well-being and the quality of your experience in each moment. This has a sort of self-fulfilling tautology, because of course whatever you’re dedicating your cognitive resources to will determine what you are thinking about therefore feeling as you move throughout the day. So maybe this is just a nice sounding fluffy idea that doesn’t really have any impact on our long-term success and happiness as individuals or as organizations?

Maybe. But if you’re convinced that hedonic adaptation is the reason why all of life’s splendors that you’ve worked so hard to achieve will eventually lose their good feels, then it probably is important. Once you stop appreciating the positive and ruminating on the negative, you’ve adapted. To negate this effect, you can attempt to develop ways to reemphasize the novelty and surprise of your newfound state of existence through habits that are dynamic and varied enough that they’ll remind you of these new states without becoming rote and repetitive.

My father knew a man who became rich and felt that his happiness would be best served by driving an exciting sports car. He purchased a Jaguar and began using this as his daily driver. His daily 40-minute commute through Los Angeles traffic now occurred in a straight-six 3.6-liter V12 sports car, but nothing else changed. Over time, the car began to have mechanical issues due to his driving habits, so he bought another one while his first Jag was in the shop. He repeated this procedure once more until he had a rotating collection of three identical Jaguars. One being commuted daily and the others in various states of repair.

It is not that every sports car purchased to reinvigorate your energies is doomed to eventually be as fulfilling as your old Junker, but if you do nothing to remind of you this new component of your life, you will rapidly adapt to it as normal and return to baseline. To forestall adaption, you must have your attention continually grabbed by your life’s new circumstances.

III. The Celebration Equilibrium

Let’s say you are a social or political institution who has finally achieved your equivalent of purchasing a shiny new Ferrari. You rev your engines loudly to let the whole neighborhood know about your success and go drag racing to feel the thrill of newfound horsepower. Everyone is now aware of your success; some applaud, some feel envious, and others are spiteful. The trick is now to keep yourself aware and content with your achievements and not engender expanding resentment from your neighbors and the broader community.

Institutionally, this would mean the implementation of regular focused celebrations or holidays of the accomplishments and liberties that your movement enabled. The novelty of these celebrations is also something to factor in. If you’re flooring your new car on the same on-ramp at the same time every week you will eventually adapt to that brief reminder as well. Developing a variable schedule and integrating unexpected events into these celebrations would account for both. The Super Bowl Half-Time show is a good model of this, the variance in performers keeps you relatively interested, but it is when the unexpected strikes (ala Janet Jackson’s right breast) that the event becomes a sensation that grabs everyone’s attention and centralizes the nature and importance of the event.

What if the goal of your organization is to have its achievement become normalized and thought of as a nonsignificant basic fact of life, not something to feel positively or negatively about? Then you’d turn these dials back up in the opposite direction. Enforce repetitive and predictable reminders and grow beyond identifying with those past achievements or even attempting to forget them altogether. This should breed a reaction of, “Why are we celebrating this again? Who’s this even for, I mean everyone knows that [Insert what was once a taboo or radical proposition here] is totally normal.” I think that many organizations and movements inadvertently install themselves into this pattern when hoping that others will remain enthused by their prior successes.

Celebrations should move to recognize and focus on intrinsic values rather than extrinsic ones. There comes a time when you stop celebrating the event itself and begin growing the new possibilities as its own celebration of your success. Managing your attention to highlight appreciation and gratitude for these new possibilities regularly helps here. I have a close friend who employs a ‘Grati-Food’ method where every meal is begun with a brief statement of what you’re grateful for that day. I’ve found that this leads to us savoring not only the food, but also the feeling of appreciative attention. Focusing on your victories here can help deliberately stall the adaptation process for yourself and, if you were to employ this within your organization, hopefully your ‘movement’ more generally by extracting maximal appreciation and satisfaction through reflection. These small practices almost by design mandate an appreciation for those intrinsic developments of growth and intimacy rather than the bold and external effects of popularity and social victory.

IV. Psychological Phenomenon as Sociocultural Phenomenon

Maybe you’re listening to me go on about how this tricky subjective phenomenon can be applied to larger sociocultural processes and thinking, “Idiot! Society is not the human mind! Why must you always be drawing X as Y body politic comparators as if they have any bearing on the world?” And I think I would agree with you. I regularly find myself saying, “I’m not really a big body politic believer…” and then providing some physiological explanation for the social topic being discussed. Probably this is just a side effect of my entire life revolving around the intricacies of the human body and the mind which rides along with it. At the same time, I can’t help but attach to these seemingly helpful analogies. The world around me seems to be suffering some psychotic relationship from failed adaptations to our new achievements. Partially we can’t seem to believe that we actually have that new shiny sports car of closer equality and expanded personal liberties. I lay much of the responsibility for this condition at the feet of once powerful organizations that fought to protect and expand human rights. The actual experiential impact of their accomplishments is currently percolating through our culture. It is manifesting in the lives of numerous young adults from various historically oppressed groups who are beginning to thrive and will continue to do so because of these historically valiant battles.

But the warriors from those battles are still around and there is now a class of citizens and a slew of organizations that operate as political war junkies. They’ve seen the heat of battle, felt the adrenaline of culture war firefights, and witnessed the true benefits of their service. How is one to return home, back to the placid life of peacetime housekeeping and the drone of daily nine-to-five duty, after such experiences? They adapt to the outcomes of their victory and begin the hunt for the next great conquest. This cycle ends up with us collectively ignoring these past victories because, “Look those same great organizations and freedom fighters are still out there on the front lines! Glory be unto them and whatever righteous cause they have found!”

A healthy society and a functioning political action organization know when they can declare victory. A stable social system knows how to celebrate and keep fresh the memories of its great achievements. While those who adapt to their newfound freedoms are bound to forget them.

∞

______________________________________________________________________________

*This ignores those individuals who teeter into psychiatric illness due to these potentially traumatic events. While many people have brief periods of difficulty following potentially traumatic events, only 5-20% will go on to have Acute Stress Disorder, and only ~8% will develop full-blown PTSD. These conditions are partially defined by a failure of the hedonic adaptive process.

**Some may complain that the phenomenon I’m describing here is more fitting with Scope Creep or some other term like it, and while I do think the term would fit here, Mission Creep seems more appropriate as it is based on prior successes and therefore has a more positive linear hedonic effect.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2011). Hedonic adaptation to positive and negative experiences. Oxford University Press.

Diener, E., Lyubomirsky, S., & King, L. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success. Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 803-855.

Lykken, D., & Tellegen, A. (1996). Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7(3), 186–189. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00355.x

Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of general psychology, 9(2), 111-131.

Healthcare:

• The alarming rise of complex genetic testing in human embryo selection (Nature 2022)

(RE)

The arrow of concern that this author draws regarding the utilization of polygenic risk scores for IVF and the need for great concern doesn't land with me. There is one brief mention of what I believe is this paper's true reason for concern, "These tests demand a broader societal discussion. By nature of their complexity, polygenic risk scores also open the door to evaluating not only disease risk, but traits such as height or intelligence. At present, not enough is known about the genetic contributors to such traits to develop meaningful tests that would allow prospective parents to select embryos. But those data are on the way and the technology is going to move quickly — it is well past time to discuss how far it should go."

This is the final statement in the editorial, but its message is strewn throughout the document. Concerns for the correct counseling of parents about the efficacy of PRS for specific diseases isn't the real issue here. It doesn't sit strongly enough as a concern. Sure, we can't say for sure what the actual probability distribution of your child's physiology w/ respect to these conditions is, so you should just shoot blindly and accept no predictive benefit and select embryos at random. If a parent has to make a decision, give them whatever information we have that is available to act on. Randomness is no better, especially at the point of selecting one of a few embryos.

• De Gregorio, D., Inserra, A., Enns, J. P., Markopoulos, A., Pileggi, M., El Rahimy, Y., ... & Gobbi, G. (2022). Repeated lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) reverses stress-induced anxiety-like behavior, cortical synaptogenesis deficits and serotonergic neurotransmission decline. Neuropsychopharmacology, 1-11.

Technology:

"Learn to utilize systems that code for you!"

• https://alphacode.deepmind.com/

• https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-alphacode

• Li, Y., Choi, D., Chung, J., Kushman, N., Schrittwieser, J., Leblond, R., ... & Vinyals, O. (2022). Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.07814.

(RA w/ some skimming)

I've spent a small number of hours, some 20-50, working on developing skills for coding in R and Python. At this time, I feel unable to competently write in either of those languages, but feel that I could utilize Stack Overflow or published code packages in R to some success. Seeing the progress in these predictive language algorithms moving into the software world only further inhibits my drive to become self sufficient. Along with the hard fact that my actual daily life will more than likely never require me to write code ever again.

[Credit to Two Minute Papers for the pointer: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg ]

• Cobbe, K., Kosaraju, V., Bavarian, M., Hilton, J., Nakano, R., Hesse, C., & Schulman, J. (2021). Training verifiers to solve math word problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.14168.

• Drori, I., Tran, S., Wang, R., Cheng, N., Liu, K., Tang, L., ... & Strang, G. (2021). A Neural Network Solves and Generates Mathematics Problems by Program Synthesis: Calculus, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, and More. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.15594.

(RA w/ Skimming)

This paper is only 7 pages in actual core content with significant supplementary examples and documents. Taken on its face, this is a remarkable accomplishment and holds great promise for schools and students. The ability to generate, grade, and evaluate collegiate-level mathematics questions (and eventually other STEM fields) is a great tool to have at your disposal. Imagine never having to write a new exam or worry that past exam information will be leaked and distributed by students. Imagine always being able to generate new questions that target your specific weaknesses with robust answers you can explore provided in real-time. This excites me greatly, for the more linguistically based fields I wonder if this is more or less helpful. I'd count biology and health sciences in this category and would be very interested to see how its question grading and generation would go.

Social Science:

• Blanchflower, D. G., & Bryson, A. (2022). The Female Happiness Paradox (No. w29893). National Bureau of Economic Research.

(RA, with a moderate level of skimming of the whole paper)

Notably, they have a focus on, "wellbeing questions – on calmness, restless sleep., being cheerful, lonely, fearful, helpless, anxious, frustrated, tense and more...." with this focus they find that, "men have higher wellbeing than women. We also find that men are more satisfied than women in regard to broader questions about the state of the economy, democracy and the state of health services and education in their country."

Yet these questions, at least the first set, are focusing on internalizing processes that are already more prone to pathology in females. Gender differences in psychopathologies roughly track males leaning heavier toward externalizing disorders and females towards internalizing disorders (Anti-Social Personality disorder vs Depression as an example) and this could be one partial explanation for the divergence the team is observing. The downward trend they note in well-being is concerning, but I wonder if other social measures of despair such as drug use, suicide, assault, etc... wouldn't catch the population of males who are also seeing decreased well-being though they may still report less helpless and fearful attacks of anxiety.

A quote from the paper goes so far as to say, "Fifth, we show that in all of the various negative affect variables we examine, including anxiety depression, bad mental health days and many more, we confirm that women are always and everywhere more unhappy than men." On average, I'm not sure how much this should falter from our base-rate assumptions for gender differences in psychopathologies.

• Garfinkel, I., Sariscsany, L., Ananat, E., Collyer, S. M., Hartley, R. P., Wang, B., & Wimer, C. (2022). The Benefits and Costs of a US Child Allowance (No. w29854). National Bureau of Economic Research.

(RA, with some data skimming)

I remain generally in favor of child tax credit systems. I'm always a bit concerned when reading things like, "The cost of this program is estimated to be 98 Billion dollars, but our models predict a returned value of 900+ Billion dollars." I think part of my apprehension comes from a past reliance on these figures when attempting to convince others of positions I held. If I would use it to nudge you closer to my position, why wouldn't you use it to nudge me?

• The Fitzwilliam Endorses the YIMBY Movement

https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/yimby?s=r

(RE)

Choice Quote: "Apparently, we’re not in flying cars colonising the galaxy because we wasted all our money on rent."

I suppose I’ll take this time and space to mention that I am broadly pro-YIMBY as well. I live in a city where the negative externalities of NIMBY mindsets and the extreme anti-development mindset of the broad progressive movement are spray painted across our sidewalks and upon the freshly set paint of new higher density building projects. As a member of what is coming to be termed, “supply side liberalism” or “State Capacity Libertarianism” it is difficult to hear the arguments against development so confidently bandied about.

___________________________________________________________________________________________ Photo Credit:

https://www.pexels.com/photo/light-red-art-pattern-11280353/

Healthcare:

1. Cooper, Z., Doyle Jr, J. J., Graves, J. A., & Gruber, J. (2022). Do Higher-Priced Hospitals Deliver Higher-Quality Care? (No. w29809). National Bureau of Economic Research.

   (RA) This paper, which I’ll aim to read in full, is one of many recent econometric-type documents which are forcing me to evaluate the relative value of service that my career choice provides to society. It's difficult to match these things up with my personal experience working with patients though. It could be that much of my current exposure has been in fields where medical treatment is more appropriate rather than the areas where more waste is occurring. But I would find that unlikely, I’ll reflect more on this as I move along through different departments with differing acuity of patients.

2. Matthew Mitchell, Certificate-of-Need Laws: How They Affect Healthcare Access, Quality, and Cost (Mercatus)

   (RE) I suppose the response would be something like, "If you can't prove that the area you wish to expand into is actually fulfilling a need, then why should we let you expand?" Which makes sense and yet its upside-down cousin is also quite convincing: "Why would I want to expand these services if they won't be used?"

   Regulatory costs of expansion then limit the development of new groups. This is like the invisible graveyard, only for healthcare centers. How many possible new hospitals, psychiatric facilities, and other resources could there be without CON laws? There must be a difference-in-difference or nearest neighbor comparison to be made with some of the other states which have made this change. I'll keep an eye on this and do some more reading as the current state I live in and will practice in is governed by multiple CON regulations. Since I'd like to eventually open a private practice, this will undoubtedly be a component of its development.

Progress:

1. Alex Tabarrok, What Operation Warp Speed Did, Didn’t and Can’t Do (Marginal Revolution)

   (RE) Operation Warp Speed was about just that, Speed. After my exposure to both the private and public healthcare discovery to market pipeline, it seems obvious to me that the best way to accelerate a project would be to remove its speed limits. Months for IRB feedback, administrative bulk, and the bulwark of funding applications were the primary things that slowed down our groups. Several of them were not actually carrying out research that posed harm to any individuals and usually not even lab mice. I wonder how much work that is currently required to undergo IRB processing could safely be fast-tracked around those systems.

2. Nicole Ruiz, A Deeper Dive into Near-Term Quantum & Applications in Drug Discovery (Compound)

   (RE) This seems like a good review of various efforts at near-term drug discovery using quantum computation platforms. I was unfamiliar with most of the organizations and initiatives that she mentioned throughout. That there are potentially so many groups with practical quantum computational applications on the horizon is very encouraging. My impression was that the limitations on maintaining quantum computers were too high for much widespread exploration to be occurring. Success in this field would be a tremendous boon for biotechnology and another notch in making biology a reliable and designable tool for humanity. Certainly shaping up to be a trend of the 2020s.

Random:

1. Raymond, C. L., & Benbow, C. P. (1986). Gender differences in mathematics: A function of parental support and student sex typing? Developmental Psychology, 22(6), 808–819. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.22.6.808

   (RA) This paper was discussed in a textbook I was reading and seems to show the intuitive, but depending on your worldview, surprising outcome that, "Results indicate that patterns of parental support did not vary as a function of child's gender. Fathers tended to be perceived to be somewhat more involved with their children's mathematical activities and mothers with their verbal activities, although these perceptions were not strong. Fathers were not more involved with mathematically talented children than with verbally talented ones, nor was the reverse found for mothers. In addition, children were not strongly sex-typed. Moreover, children's sex-typing did not relate to perceived parental behaviors or to SAT scores. It is suggested that these aspects of socialization did not relate to current sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability, which have been shown to relate to later sex differences in achievement in quantitative areas."

   Still an old social science paper, so strong prior to this specific study not surviving deeper investigation/reproduction. Although this matches my priors and what I believe to be the status of contemporary research into the issue at hand.

2. Reissman, C., Aron, A., & Bergen, M. R. (1993). Shared activities and marital satisfaction: Causal direction and self-expansion versus boredom. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 10(2), 243–254. https://doi.org/10.1177/026540759301000205

   &

3. Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples' shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.273

   (RA) Both papers are were referenced in a paper I was reading. Findings seemed to be that self-defined exciting activities are associated with higher marital satisfaction, which was not true for simply spending more time together or spending time together doing pleasant activities. The second paper seems to show this holding for even short-length activities. Older social science paper.

4. Lyubomirsky, S. (2011). Hedonic adaptation to positive and negative experiences. Oxford University Press.d https://escholarship.org/content/qt2w73s294/qt2w73s294.pdf

   (RE) This paper was the initial inspiration and provided source material for an upcoming piece on hedonic adaptation. Good review of the subject and various methods to address either slowing or accelerating an individual’s rate of adaptation. Useful throughout.

Some Nomenclature:

RS: Read Source Material

RE: Read Everything

RA = Read Abstract

RTP = Read Title Plan to read more

RT = Read Title

This is a descending level of engagement from going so far as actually digging through their source documents to verify their claims, reading everything contained just within the paper, simply reading an abstract, or just grabbing and ingesting the title of some piece.

Web3 & Healthcare

1. (RS) Kostick-Quenet, K., Mandl, K. D., Minssen, T., Cohen, I. G., Gasser, U., Kohane, I., & McGuire, A. L. (2022). How NFTs could transform health information exchange. Science, 375(6580), 500–502. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abm2004

2. (RTP) Rieke, N., Hancox, J., Li, W. et al. The future of digital health with federated learning. npj Digit. Med. 3, 119 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-020-00323-1

These two papers are meat to fill out the skeleton of a brief idea that I wrote out in mid-2020 that looked like this: "Integrating new developments in Multi-Party Computation with federated machine learning, and homomorphic encryption could have huge potential for a decentralized massive data storage/analysis with personal data ownership via blockchain." The original idea was spurred by this paper, Secure, privacy-preserving and federated machine learning in medical imaging (2020).

But NFT's provide an easy solution to one of the early issues I noticed, proof of ownership and security. At the time I imagined some sub-dermal implanted RFIP tags with a PGP type encryption mechanisms that allowed orgs/individuals append-only access to your personalized medical data. I envisioned some minimum length of exposure to the RFIP tag to grant access, thus allowing emergency medical services to access health records in cases of emergencies or should you become unresponsive. (You'll have to forgive me if the idea seems too out there re: medical implants)

Technology:

1. (RA) Degrave, J., Felici, F., Buchli, J. et al. Magnetic control of tokamak plasmas through deep reinforcement learning. Nature 602, 414–419 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04301-9

First Starcraft, then Fusion. The degree of control in the conformations of plasma generated within these Tokomaks is really notable and speaks very well for future progression in this field. Keeping an eye on this development.

1. (RS) Jones, D.T., Thornton, J.M. The impact of AlphaFold2 one year on. Nat Methods 19, 15–20 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-021-01365-3

Alpha fold remains one of my favorite developments of the past few years and something I believe is still under-appreciated by the general public.

Social Science:

1. (RT) It shouldn't surprise anyone that the Marshmallow Test results are failing to replicate and 40 year follow-ups aren't yielding any predictive effects on participants life course. Though I will still continue to reference this study during my failures in self restraint. I guess I'll just feel better about what they mean for 60 year old me's fortunes.

Fun:

1. Best Illusion of the year contest 2021 from the Neural Correlate Society

∞

Image Credit: Glitch Lab App

I.

You are; therefore, you think. Or so at least that’s what Barbara Tversky would have you believe from her arguments in Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. Long before people were writing blog posts, debating rabbinical texts, or even gutturally spewing pre-phonemes; they were moving. Cognitive linguists like Noam Chomsky have focused on the importance, perhaps even the centrality, of language to the nature of human consciousness. If consciousness is a form of self-referential reflection then it makes sense that one could only reflect if one has the linguistic concepts required to faithfully describe oneself and your relationship to others and the environment. Tversky’s point is to say that long before we developed any of these linguistic concepts, we still had to navigate the world and understand our relationship to it through our physical forms. Our sense of self, our awareness of others, our conceptualization of our environment occur through understanding our physical being. This framing is known as, “Embodied Cognition” and argues that features of our cognitive processes are formed by the entire body’s neural processing, not just the ones happening in the parts of our brain that oversee language and self-referential thought.

While the true nature of human consciousness probably occurs through a mixture of these paradigms, here we’ll assume that those of embodied cognition are more ancient and foundational to our sense of self. Our sense of space and motion are core to much of our evolutionary progression. From the early development of photosensitive organelles that allowed Phototrophs in the ocean to move towards the sun for energy to contemporary subthalamic neural relays that allow us to interact with and manipulate our environment. Move towards food. Flee from danger. Flatter to fornicate. All these processes are facilitated by you understanding your relationship to your physical environment and how to utilize it for survival purposes. The same holds for any other species of animal. While some may deny animals have very highly developed levels of consciousness, spending enough time around other animals is pretty convincing that they have at least some form of it. And if they don’t, at what level do you make that limitation? What of the Bonobo? Or the Gorilla? Their representation of themselves as an agent in their environment is critical to their success in this world just as it is to us.

The process of resource limitations also places a value on regular migration. When winter comes, or when a territory has gone bare, it’s protective to leave and search for new resources. Bacteria that do not migrate towards resources quickly die and fade from the germplasm. Even if one location is rich in resources to support you it still probably makes sense to understand your environment so that you have backup plans and escape routes in mind.

II.

Okay, so movement is a very strong evolutionary pressure and successful movement requires some ability to interact with, understand, and predict outcomes in the external environment. And these capacities for environmental self-awareness likely presented themselves far before linguistic capacities developed. What’s the big deal?

Have you ever noticed that most post-apocalyptic novels or plotlines revolve around people just wandering around? While Tyler Cowen was interviewing Emily St. John Mandel, author of the novel and upcoming Amazon prime series Station Eleven, this topic came up:

COWEN: In so many post-apocalyptic novels, it seems that people wander a lot. Do they wander too much? Should they just stay put?

ST. JOHN MANDEL: I had this conversation with another post-apocalyptic novelist. Would everybody stop walking? Why is everybody wandering endlessly in a post-apocalypse?

Think about it. Why is it rare in a zombie apocalypse series to come across a small group of people subsistence farming? And when they do turn up, something always goes wrong that involves the complete destruction of that little settlement they’ve created. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road the father and son don’t even have names. They go by, “The Man” and “The Boy” and they hardly ever speak. And what do they do when the end of the world is around them? They wander. They migrate in the hopes of better environments. Their world is described as monotonous and gray, frozen in ash, unchanging. And still, we realize that if they weren’t moving, they’d go insane. Those who they encounter who have settled down are depicted as having fully abandoned their humanity.

Okay, so interesting. Even in our end-of-the-world fables, we have our imagined selves moving almost constantly and facing great pains if they try to settle down. And that process of wandering around and interacting with the environment has some evolutionary effect on cognition/consciousness in humanity. But that seems a pretty tenuous string to thread and why is this useful to be aware of anyhow? What possible value could this have to my life now?

III.

Over the past two years, many people around the world have undergone a great natural experiment in the nature of movement and its absence. How many individuals or families spent a majority of their time throughout 2020 hardly leaving their apartments, townhomes, or residential facilities? I originally thought that this could be an environment I would thrive in. Go home from the lab? Get to stay in and just read and do research or go on long and wandering runs, who could ask for more? I tried to learn how to code, I tried to write papers with people in my lab, I tried to do and learn many things and mostly, I failed.

Agnes Callard wrote about this phenomenon and detailed the difficulty of rising towards the personal educational promises of this pandemic’s forced hermitage. About feeling a great struggle to produce, or to feel that what one is producing is concrete and real in its worth and function while stuck at home. I think this is something that more people dealt with than we really like to discuss. Lots of people thrived in the pandemic, but mostly, people who were stuck at home were suffering in little ways.

If our sense of self-awareness, of relationship with our environment and the others within it, begins not with our ability to communicate, think, and banter with individuals; but from our movement within space, then no degree of highly connected language sharing systems will provide the feeling of wholistic personal progress.

Within cities and rural areas, the implicit need to move through space is maintained by different systems. In an urban setting, while you may never travel more than five miles from your apartment, you will likely move through dozens or even hundreds of unique environments, challenges, and interactions. Each interaction is a composite node in the manifold of the day’s activities. In rural localities, the process of completing even simple tasks can require traveling long distances. Growing up, if my family needed a grocery item, at least thirty minutes of time had to be spent rocketing through plains and canyons for even this one small task.

Included in these processes of daily life are whatever talismans, productive projects, and resources you ferry along to complete your task. Though your head will touch the same linen case that night, it feels like you’ve embarked on and conquered a multitude of highly complex tasks in varied environments.

Now, as all of us forced hermits had to learn, even the most productive days spent within 750 square feet of enclosed walls fail to provide that same felt sense of movement. If we were stuck this way for a long time, perhaps we could find base fulfillment in a non-motile, yet text-rich world.

But who really wants that?

∞

Hello, Good Morning, Greetings, Howdy, Bonjour, and most importantly, Welcome.

The form and substance of this publishing space are still as of yet undefined. The ethos and intention of this publishing space are well known. The actual mechanics of drafting, editing, and publishing the content that my brain construes for this space are still under development. So for now, let’s just focus on that second point and let some flow of consciousness brain blabber fill this first trial balloon of a post.

In 1962 Aldous Huxley, the English author, philosopher, and intellectual powerhouse published his final novel, Island. The novel’s protagonist, Will Farnaby, shipwrecks on a small island halfway between Sumatra and the Andaman Islands named Pala. The novel takes the form of a first-person ethnography of Palanese culture as Will is given shelter and medical attention from several leaders of the Palanese people. The Kingdom of Pala operates as a quasi-utopian bastion that has successfully remained isolated from the rest of the developing world. It has a decentralized cooperative community economy modeled after Georgism, a spiritual practice that refutes superstitions and hybridizes elements of western science and Mahayana Buddhism, multi-family child-rearing, coming of age psychedelic rituals, humanist medicine, a guilt-free embrace of human sexuality through tantric practices, and even birds that have evolved to patrol the island and caw out, “Attention!” and “Here and Now!” to help reinforce mindfulness practices.

Huxley was inspired to write this novel as a counterpoint to his famous dystopian novel, Brave New World. It attempts to offer a solution to each of the tragedies described in that work and had a profound impact on me when I first read it in my early 20’s. Since then, I’ve grown disillusioned with some of the concepts present in the work, but many of its principles are still key to what I’m attempting to accomplish in life. I think a lot about what it means to live a good life and what tools or mechanisms we have that can help foster more broad human flourishing while also improving your own states of health and happiness. This also requires a reflection on the myriad methods that others have devised to try and help that have backfired stupendously. I’ll be attempting to explore this space with humility and curiosity while hopefully mapping out the borders of what my personally updated Palanese protocols would look like.

So who am I?

I’ll be writing this blog pseudonymously, but I’ll provide some background as to where my mindset and experience come from. I’m currently in the early phases of training to become a Medical Doctor. I still have some time to decide on a specialty but strongly lean towards practicing Psychiatry. Before this, I spent time working as an assistant in research labs at a major state medical school and a large international technology company. Before that, I attended a large state university and worked closely with many administrative and student groups. I’ve spent a large portion of my adult life seeing how the sausage is made within academia and private industry. Which may or may not have to do with some of my disillusionment from the utopian concepts outlined above.

The plan is to write about the topics that interest me, which will mostly stem from the fields of bio-health science and technology. Though it will probably include much more knowing my way to get lost in topics and blabber. This is an experiment for myself as well as any of you who choose to join me in these writings. Hopefully, we’ll discover some cool things along the way together. Maybe we’ll even stumble upon some ways to manifest our own personal Palas.

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(Image Source :: More of Sean Conway’s fantastic orthoimagery renders can be found Here)