Craig Lambert in Harvard Magazine:

In 1968, Stephen Bergman ’66, M.D. ’73, was driving through the desert in Morocco on a dead-straight road. At one point, he noticed the sun going down directly in front of him while the moon was rising behind. “I had never seen anything like that on Earth,” he recalls.

The sunset/moonrise moment seemed an epiphany, “a sign,” he says, that the symmetries and mysteries of the world, which art echoes, were, for him, life at its richest. Somehow it seemed to validate his innate wish to be a writer, although at that time, Bergman’s actual writing “was too precious to show anyone,” he says. Still, “an adventure had shown itself to me. I loved feeling free of all these damn schools I had spent my life in.”

Even so, Bergman scarcely imagined himself becoming one of the world’s most widely read authors. A decade hence, his first novel, The House of God, on his internship at a Boston hospital, appeared under the pen name “Samuel Shem.” Over time it built a vast global readership that continues even today, with more than 2 million copies sold and translations available in all the world’s major languages.

More here.

Dan Gardner in PastPresentFuture:

Daniel Kahneman died last week at the age of 90. His legacy is immense. He was, as he put it, the “grandfather” of behavioural economics — think economics but with a realistic model of what a human is — a role which won him a Nobel Prize. But Kahneman’s legacy is bigger than that. Kahneman and Tversky changed how we think about how people think, and if you change that, you change everything. You can see their influence all across the social sciences and much of the humanities.

But this is not a remembrance of Daniel Kahneman, whose endorsement of two of my books will forever be a professional highlight. There are many, lovely reflections on Kahneman as a man and scholar. I recommend Daniel Engber’s appreciation of Kahneman’s willingness to say those three simple words, “I was wrong.”

This post is about complexity.

More here.

William H. Janeway at Project Syndicate:

The detective in a typical British crime procedural would say that Mordecai Kurz “has got form.” An emeritus professor at Stanford University, Kurz received his doctorate in economics from Yale University more than 60 years ago. In 1970, he co-authored a book with Kenneth J. Arrow, a soon-to-be Nobel laureate in economics and among the greatest cross-over mathematician-social scientists ever.

Kurz would go on to establish a distinctive platform for criticizing John Muth and Robert Lucas’s rational expectations hypothesis, demonstrating with rigor that any number of models could be mapped to the historical statistical record to reveal a spectrum of alternative “rational beliefs.” And now, in his book The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age, he brings the same rigor to bear on the question of what shapes income growth and the distribution of wealth in an economy driven by privately owned technological innovations.

Kurz’s theory of “technological market power” distinguishes legally sanctioned monopolies based on innovation from illegal conspiracies that restrain trade.

More here.

NOTE: The previous video (Chap. 5) about transformers is here.

Exit Strategy

Tell me there is a way to believe it all,
an exit strategy with groggy murmurs
of nothing but rest and a quiet universe.

All I can think of is my child, asleep
in bed, dealing with whatever birthright
his dreams afford his fears, waiting to wake.

Sometimes I feel like Kepler, poised to inherit
pages of wrinkled data, but grumbling,
What a holy-fucking mess Tycho left behind.

Under the surface of the crowd’s rumble
is a song. We could have danced, you know,
to the how-not-why of these perfect heartbeats.

It’s true. You’ve not been asked to understand.
You’ve been asked to listen, and work it out.

by George Murray
from The Rush Here
Nightwood Editions, 2007

From Time Magazine:

An estimated 30% of people who received the COVID-19 vaccine also reported nasty side effects. Making matters worse, like a nightmarish self-fulfilling prophecy, the very words used by clinicians might well have caused some of this harm. Of course, doctors and nurses do not deliberately set out to hurt patients—far from it. They want to ensure that patients are fully informed. However, as our research shows, their words might unintentionally ramp up the effects of a psychological phenomenon that operates under the radar. This phenomenon is called the “nocebo effect.”

Characterized as the “evil-twin” of the placebo effect, nocebo effects are harms that arise from negative expectations. While placebo effects are those beneficial outcomes that arise when we expect to feel better and, as a result, do, nocebo effects are what happen when we expect to feel worse.

More here.

Alejandra Manjarrez in The Scientist:

Hematopoietic stem cells give rise to all blood cells in the body. Most of the time they are not dividing. Rather, they serve as a reserve for the times when the body needs rapid blood formation. “One of the reasons why we have this kind of cellular Swiss bank account [is to protect] the cellular integrity,” said Britta Will, a stem cell biologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Each cell division may harm the cells’ DNA and other macromolecules, so the very demanding task of daily blood cell production is instead accomplished by more committed descendants, namely progenitor blood cells that can differentiate into specific cell types.

As individuals age, this cellular bank is not as readily available as in youth; the capacity of blood stem cells to self-renew declines. This reduced ability to replenish diverse blood cell types may result in impaired immune surveillance and contribute to the development of aging-associated cancers or other degenerative diseases. In a study published in Cell Stem Cell, Will and her colleagues showed that young mouse hematopoietic stem cells tightly regulate iron homeostasis to keep intracellular iron levels low, a capacity which may be lost during aging.¹ Furthermore, when researchers subjected them to additional iron restriction by using iron chelators, these cells activated a molecular response that is linked to their regenerative capacity. A treatment for intermittently removing excess iron in mice over the course of 13 months prevented the age-associated decline in these cells’ function.

More here.

Jonathan Chatwin in the Asian Review of Books:

Eric Arthur Blair once wrote that he was born into the “lower-upper-middle class”, having cachet but no capital. His father had been a sub-deputy opium agent in India, where Blair was born in 1903; his French mother was the daughter of a Burmese teak merchant. He attended Wellington, briefly, and then Eton—but with fees taken care of as a King’s Scholar. He was, he wrote later, relatively happy at Eton, but he recalls his prep school, St Cyprian’s, with something close to loathing in his essay “Such, Such Were The Joys”—a place where he was constantly reminded of his “lower-upper-middle class” status: one boy, having queried Blair as to his father’s income, told him with “amused contempt” that his father earned over two hundred times as much money.

Once he had finished school, Blair—dubbed by Martin Amis an “auto-contrarian”—decided not to progress to Oxford or Cambridge, but instead to turn towards Empire—where plenty of men with indistinct class backgrounds managed to refashion themselves.

More here.

Jonathan Haidt in After Babel:

Odgers recently stated the skeptics’ case in an essay in Nature titled The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness? The essay offered a critique of my recent book, The Anxious Generation. Odgers’ primary criticism is that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.”  She also warns that my ringing of a false alarm “might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people,” which, she suggests, are social ills such as racism, economic hardship, and the lingering impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its disparate impact on children in low SES families.

In this response essay, I’ll present the two main problems I see with the skeptics’ approach, as exemplified in Odgers’ review:

1. 1. Odgers is wrong to say that I have no evidence of causation
   2. Odgers’ alternative explanation does not fit the available facts.

More here.

Darrin M. McMahon in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Equity has become a familiar term on American college campuses in recent years, as well as a flashpoint in the nation’s culture wars. Centers for teaching and learning embrace it, as do institutes and education schools promoting “inclusive excellence” and “equity in higher education.” Meanwhile, diversity, equity, and inclusion offices have multiplied to such an extent that they have generated a reaction: Conservative politicians now seek to close them, and many on the right treat “equity” as a trigger word, progressive code for a litany of menacing ideas, including quotas and critical race theory, which emanate, they charge, from America’s “woke” colleges.

But what does “equity” really mean, and when and why did it emerge as a contemporary key word?

More here.

Martha Bayles at The Hedgehog Review:

If the Poetics, Aristotle’s treatise on the subject of tragedy, is rarely studied today, it is largely because the French Neoclassicists of the seventeenth century turned Aristotle’s descriptions of Greek tragedy into prescriptions. Finessed by Corneille and Racine, ignored by Molière, challenged by the Romantics, and rejected by the Modernists, the Poetics was all but forgotten by 1953. But each in his own way, Beckett and Clarke heeded the deeper insights it contains.

The most important of these insights is that plot is the key to character. Aristotle did not reach this conclusion because he thought character unimportant. Rather, it was because, as he argued in the Ethics, the only way for one human being to discern the true character of another is to observe the other’s actions over a long period, preferably a lifetime. In the theater, where such lengthy observation is not possible, tragedy forces the issue by taking “a man like ourselves,” who despite his good intentions stands “between the two extremes” of “eminently good and just” and “vice and depravity,” and subjecting him to at least one wrenching, agonizing “reversal of fortune.”

more here.

Deborah Levy at Literary Review:

Earth was dying. We had five years left to live. Ziggy Stardust, the bisexual alien rock star, was sent from another planet to grey, binary 1970s Britain to give us a message of hope. I’m not sure about the hope part of the message, but he really turned us on. 

Apparently, Ziggy was a fictional character. We knew that, but we didn’t want to know it. It’s not like we were in the mood for critical thinking as we set about freeing our secret freakish selves. Bowie understood the power and point of enigma, right to the end of his life. Narrative needs to be porous so that we can fill it with our own yearnings, desires, imaginations. It’s still hard to accept that Ziggy didn’t fall from the stars in full makeup to blow our minds. Yes, other people helped create him. One of them was Suzi Ronson (born Fussey), a young, sparky hairstylist from Bromley, who has now written an entertaining book about the part she played in crafting the Ziggy persona.

more here.

Derek Bok in Harvard Magazine:

IN DECEMBER, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were summoned to appear before a congressional committee. For five hours, they were subjected to withering interrogation about the response of their universities to the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students following the massacre of 1,200 people in Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza. In response to repeated questions about how their universities would deal with students calling for “intifada” or chanting “from the river to the sea,” the answers the presidents gave in seeking to explain the intricacies of the First Amendment provoked an angry response from several members of the committee for being too legalistic and even calls by a few for the presidents to resign. Within days, M. Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, stepped down from her position. And January 2, Claudine Gay, facing a growing number of plagiarism accusations, announced her resignation as president of Harvard University. “This is just the beginning of exposing the rot in our most ‘prestigious’ higher-education institutions,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik [’06], Republican of New York, after Gay resigned.

The public shaming and subsequent resignations of the leaders of some of America’s top universities may shock some observers. After all, these institutions dominate every list of the world’s finest universities. Their faculty members figure prominently in each new crop of Nobel Prize winners. Students still clamor to gain admission, to such a point that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford admit fewer than 5 percent of the students who apply. And year after year, these universities receive hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from individuals and foundations.

Yet these same institutions are under intense attack from both ends of the political spectrum.

More here.

Saima Sidik in Nature:

In 2010, Theresa Chaklos was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia — the first in a series of ailments that she has had to deal with since. She’d always been an independent person, living alone and supporting herself as a family-law facilitator in the Washington DC court system. But after illness hit, her independence turned into loneliness. Loneliness, in turn, exacerbated Chaklos’s physical condition. “I dropped 15 pounds in less than a week because I wasn’t eating,” she says. “I was so miserable, I just would not get up.” Fortunately a co-worker convinced her to ask her friends to help out, and her mood began to lift. “It’s a great feeling” to know that other people are willing to show up, she says.

Many people can’t break out of a bout of loneliness so easily. And when acute loneliness becomes chronic, the health effects can be far-reaching. Chronic loneliness can be as detrimental as obesity, physical inactivity and smoking according to a report by Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general. Depression, dementia, cardiovascular disease¹ and even early death² have all been linked to the condition. Worldwide, around one-quarter of adults feel very or fairly lonely, according to a 2023 poll conducted by the social-media firm Meta, the polling company Gallup and a group of academic advisers (see go.nature.com/48xhu3p). That same year, the World Health Organization launched a campaign to address loneliness, which it called a “pressing health threat”.

But why does feeling alone lead to poor health?

More here.

Motion

If you are the amber mare
……………. I am the road of blood
If you are the first snow
……………. I am he who lights the hearth of dawn
If you are the tower of light
……………. I am the spike burning in your mind
If you are the morning tide
……………. I am the first bird’s cry
If you are the basket of oranges
……………. I am the knife of the sun
If you are the stone altar
……………. I am the sacrilegious hand
If you are the sleeping land
……………. I am the green cane
If you are the wind’s leap
……………. I am the buried fire
If you are the water’s mouth
……………. I am the mouth of the moss
If you are the forest of the clouds
……………. I am the axe that parts it
If you are the profaned city
……………. I am the rain of consecration
If you are the yellow mountain
……………. I am the red arms of lichen
If you are the rising sun
……………. I am the road of blood

by Octavio Paz
from Octavio Paz the Collected Poems 1957-1987
Carcanet, 1987

Yascha Mounk and Alexandra Hudson in Persuasion:

Alexandra Hudson is a writer, an adjunct professor at the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy, and the founder of the publication Civic Renaissance. Hudson’s first book is The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Alexandra Hudson discuss how civility is different from mere politeness; why true civility can require engaging in uncomfortable conversations and delivering hard truths; and why certain social norms and expectations have proven timeless.

More here.

Harry Cliff at Literary Hub:

The first thing to understand is that all measurements come with “uncertainties” or “errors,” two words often used interchangeably. The uncertainly on a measurement is an expression of the precision with which we think we have measured a particular quantity. Uncertainties come in two key types. There are statistical uncertainties and systematic uncertainties.

Let’s start with statistical uncertainty. To draw on the classic example, imagine I gave you a coin and asked you to determine if that coin is fair, or to put it more formally, if the probability of that coin coming up heads or tails is equal. To test this, you toss the coin twice and get one head and one tail. On the face of it, this might suggest that the coin is fair.

But you probably have the feeling that we can’t really be sure from only two tosses. Indeed, like all measurements, this one comes with an uncertainty, and with only two coin tosses this uncertainly is large. I’ll spare you the math and tell you that it’s around 26 percent.

More here.