Blog Archives

The Season of Ignorance

Posted on October 14, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

When history books are written, John McCain’s may be remembered most for his role in catapulting Sarah Palin to the national stage.

The midterm election season is heading for the final stretch and what has disturbed me the most are the reports that seem to herald a race to the bottom that is appalling to say the least. Sarah Palin seems to be just one of a myriad of the people spewing ignorance and hate. Mostly women, all white and all Tea Party. Their trumpets of ignorance include stating that Muslim law is taking over parts of the US, masturbation is adultery, that the healthcare bill creates government death sqauds and a twisting of facts and spewing of hate (against Latinos, Muslims, gays, almost anyone not Christian and white), dehumanizing anyone not like them. It is as if Jerry Springer‘s cast is standing for election. And reason and critical thinking are scarce in this debate.

Are we living in the US in the 21st century or some country at the edge of the dark ages ? We laugh at Ahmadinejad and Holocaust deniers and tune in to Rush Limbaugh’s denials over Obama’s religion and birth (polls in August by the Time magazine and the Pew center show anywhere from one-third to almost half of the Republicans saying that they think Obama is a Muslim). Religion is at the forefront now more than ever and every year, the power of the religious right grows ever more. And to think that I used to laugh derisively at people in rural areas of India voting almost solely based on the caste of the candidate. Obama also seems to have brought out the latent racism in the country. No one talks about it as such, of course.

I worry about the declining lack of adherence to even the most basic of facts and the almost retarded level of reason and critical thinking. In a world that is changing so rapidly, resources depleting and conflicts rising, how can address the issues if people seem incapable of even uttering a coherent sentence ? I can understand people are angry about the economy, but are these angry people incapable of understanding how the very ideas they champion have been the cause of their state ? How can more deregulation fix the problems of Wall Street or the harm caused by companies such as BP ? How can they not see the designs of the people who are pouring money that is turning their fears into something that can only make matters worse ? How can they not see the link between the people who lied about the Iraq War and how it very costs are a big reason for the mess we’re in economically ?

Enough has been written about all of this that I don’t want to spend too much time writing about it. But, I worry about what the future holds for Maya and all our children in this country that is their home. This is how atrocities like the Holocaust or slavery or Native American genocide come to pass. Bit by bit, with people like me going about their daily lives with their worries cocooned by some personal well-being and an inability to act. Am I as deluded as they are in seeing the outcome of the slippery slope we’re sliding down ? A part of me says that all this is more media hype than anything else. After all, didn’t Bill Clinton, the man liberals loved for his intellectualism and charisma, fire the Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, for saying that masturbation was normal human behavior ?

Let me end with a link on a more humorous note, to a satirical take on the current season of madness:

“Man oh man, I’m mad. I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Take what? I don’t know. And that makes me mad too.”

Related articles by Zemanta:

Leave a Reply ?

Getting Rid of Open Loops

Posted on October 4, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

“Nothing focuses the mind like a deadline.”

Image courtesy of flickr, picture by vambo25

I’ve lived a significant part of my life on this basis. There are things that I love to do and they get done immediately, regardless of how important or urgent they are. There are other things that get done only because they’ve become urgent. While I suspect it has been true through the ages, the modern world seems to throw up ever increasing numbers of things that we don’t like to do. We even coined a word for them. Chores. The very mention of the word makes one catatonic. Bills, taxes, groceries dishes to load, dishes to unload, trash to take out, groceries again because you forgot some things the first time, servicing the car, getting your tooth drilled and on and on and on. And a single category like bills hides the horror of the sheer number of them: auto insurance, credit card for each spouse, home insurance, land line, cell phone, website annual fee, garbage, electricity, mortgage.  The sheer ennui in just thinking of all of this makes me want to stop writing.

For a long time, I managed the list in my head and usually managed to avoid dropping the ball and forgetting to pay. But, occasionally I did forget to pay the credit card bill on time. When that happened, I’d call and wheedle customer support with statements such as my mostly impeccable payment history, my credit rating, my loyalty with the number of years of being with them to cancel the late fee and finance charges. Usually I won, but I did pay a late fee a couple of times in these past fifteen years or so. And when Maya was born, I forgot to pay the property tax on time and paid a hefty $300 penalty for missing the deadline by a day. I avoided using autopay on things like credit cards because I wanted to stay on top of our expenses and to eyeball the expense list to make sure that there were no fake charges. Overwhelmed eventually, I switched to autopay on most of them  (and I shudder to think of all the stamps I licked in the days before paying via the web).

Every now and then, I’d invest a little time in maintaining a todo list. In the days before laptops became more commonplace, I attempted the task with a notebook. I liked the way people carried notebooks or diaries and wrote in them. They looked important, professional, coherent and what they put down seemed vital. I wanted that. A diary full of vital stuff. But I didn’t carry the notebook or diary with me everywhere and even when I did, I often didn’t write them down because it seemed more work. “How could I forget about them, if they were important ?”, was my thinking.

Then the novelty of computers kicked in and I started using the computer to maintain todo lists. This had to be a superior solution to the paper. The computer could even popup reminders of an impending doom. So, I ran with this for a short time. And by short time, I mean not even a month. Very soon, I found myself ignoring things on my todo list and instead doing whatever it was that pleased me. The main problem seemed to be that I didn’t take my computer everywhere and quickly found myself reprioritizing my tasks based on things that were not present in the computer’s todo list. I didn’t get around to adding them to the list when I got to the computer because I was doing the next thing and it felt cumbersome to type up stuff that I could easily remember anyway.

I scouted for of books on time management and finally purchased the two classics in the genre, Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and Hyrum Smith’s  “10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management“. The only thing I still remember from Smith’s book is that everything comes with an invisible price tag, time. Every time we buy a new thing, be it a book, a CD, a gadget or a house, the thing we don’t seem to realize is that it takes time to deal with this new thing and time is what we seem to lack in this modern world. From the time I read the book, I still mostly remember to account for the time the new stuff will take. What I couldn’t figure out well enough was to get better at predicting accurately my estimate of the time a task would take. From Covey’s book, I took away the classic 4 quadrant method of deciding how to prioritize activities. But even the simple task of deciding what tasks went into what quadrant seemed onerous. I continued to sporadically attempt to use a todo program on the computer (which involved spending time looking at new tools to do the job), but it continued to go nowhere.

Next came the Palm handheld. I even invested some money in a software (called Datebk3) specially designed for the Palm that did a bunch of things that were better than the default diary application that came with the Palm. The Palm seemed to solve the problem of ubiquity. It was small enough to carry everywhere and data entry wasn’t too cumbersome. It could popup reminders and even show me the tasks and appointments in a single page. But a month later, I was back to doing things the old way. The todo list was languishing again.

Disappointed and clueless was I. I tried to analyze why I failed so repeatedly at setting up and maintaining a todo list, but couldn’t come up with a single good reason. Maybe it required practice and I couldn’t devote time to mastering it, maybe the list was for people with poor memory, maybe the list was for people with too many things to do, maybe there was no getting around the fact that these were chores and that I’d never get around to enjoying them. But I also didn’t seem to be doing badly, after all it was a rare occasion that I failed to pay a bill or my taxes.

So, the state remained. Things got dropped, they were not things that punished me for being late such as bills or taxes, or things that nagged or screamed at me, but were nevertheless important things. For example, I forgot to get myself a new Ecopass when the year dawned and had to make time to go collect it from the office instead of having it delivered to me. Before Maya was born, I usually forgot to get a flu shot. I still haven’t managed to schedule an appointment for an annual physical exam, I forget to schedule my eye exam for over six months. Or I’d race to beat the deadline and in the process drop the ball on a few things or blow up on Shanthala or stress myself out in finishing. And the things I thought were really important: a long list of writing ideas that I want to add to the blog but haven’t even started, a list of stuff that I started, but couldn’t get around to constructing a coherent narrative, books that I want to read, websites that I want to visit, news articles that merited a longer time with them. I noted all this in the corner of my mind, tried new tools every year or so and continued to dump them with the speed of a new year resolution.

One day, I came across an article on GTD rather accidentally. What caught my eye was this idea of open loops. According to David Allen, the inventor of GTD, recording the information is vital. Instead of merely remembering that I need to schedule an annual physical exam, if I could record the task in some tool, be it a software or even a piece of paper, I could go on to being more productive and even have a good chance of achieving the goal of scheduling a physical. In other words, scheduling was not as important as capturing the piece of information and eliminating the open loop of distraction that comes from having the thought continuously pop up in our mind like an out of whack alarm.

In that one fundamental idea of capturing information some place safe and outside our brain, I realized that the chief reason no todo list worked for me was that I relied too much on my memory to keep track of things. Internally, I still prided myself for remembering complex pieces of disconnected information (such as all my credit card numbers, the telephone numbers of all my friends, all kinds of trivia about movies and books, pieces of writing ideas and ideas and quotes from books). In India, people honored the ability to recite scripture from memory as much, if not more, than applying that knowledge. I remember Shanthala telling me how surprised she was in her residency program to hear world experts that she worked with claim their ignorance on some detail and look it up in a book without feeling they were somehow lesser mortals for doing so. In India, we almost never saw people who didn’t wince for forgetting some piece of information and needing to look it up. I grew up being patted on my back for my almost photographic memory. I was wedded to that image of myself.

The key to why I forgot to do so many things was not that I needed a system to prioritize and remind me as much as a system to capture the things to do. I had to get rid of the open loops.

N.B: The website 43folders (which may have been where I first encountered this idea) has an interesting speculation on why GTD appeals to geeks so much (I resist labels, but couldn’t help but see the geek in me when I read this list) :

  • geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
  • geeks love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
  • geeks crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
  • geeks like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
  • geeks like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
  • geeks are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
  • geeks like fixing things on their own terms
  • geeks have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff
  • geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
  • geeks love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
  • geeks crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
  • geeks like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
  • geeks like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
  • geeks are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
  • geeks like fixing things on their own terms
  • geeks have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff
Leave a Reply ?

Three Pictures Of The World We’re Creating

Posted on October 2, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

Another week when the words wouldn’t come out. Of if they did, they were an incoherent mumble. Or if they did, they were in the middle of the night when I had no easy way to pin them to paper or screen. And if I tried to pin them down by trotting down at 2 am or 3, when the words seemed to make sense, they faded away like a mirage. And now, its the end of the week and the weekend is crowded with things to do and people to see. But these three pictures caught my eye as I surfed the news. So, here’s another week where the pictures speak for words.

The three pictcures paint the world – starkly, in my opinion – we’re creating.

This first picture is the first snapshot of the world seen through the haze of particulate matter. NASA released this picture this week and I ran across it at the Wired Science Blogs, penned by Duncan Greene. From the article:

“Many estimates of air pollution in developing countries are innaccurate, as there’s no network of surface-based sensors that can find the worst-polluted areas. Scientists regularly have to rely on a few dated observations of questionable veracity.

However, Nasa has just published the first long-term global map that shows density of particulate matter below 2.5 micrometres in diameter. This size is important, because it’s small enough to get past the body’s defences and accumulate in the lungs, making it dangerous to human health. Epidemologists believe that they cause millions of premature deaths each year.

Satellites can’t easily scan the surface of the Earth — they instead scan a column of air in the atmosphere, and the difficulty comes in getting readings at a particular level out of that data. The team who produced the map, Aaron van Donkelaar and Randall Martin at Dalhousie University, in Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada, blended total-column aerosol measurements from satellites with information about how aerosols are distributed vertically in the atmosphere to obtain the data.

The World Health Organisation’s recommended level is 10 micrograms per cubic metre, so anything on the map that’s green or above is cause for concern. Once in the lungs, the particles can cause asthma, cardiovascular diseases and bronchitis. Some very fine particles can even get into the bloodstream.

Some of the particulate matter is man-made and some is natural, and scientists haven’t quite worked out the relative quantities yet, but both are dangerous to human health. In the Arabian and Sahara deserts, its mostly natural mineral dust lifted by the wind, but in eastern China and Northern India, it’s more likely to be soot particles emitted by power plants, factories and cars.“

Global satellite-derived map of PM2.5 averaged over 2001-2006. Credit: Dalhousie University, Aaron van Donkelaar

I was appalled at the haze over the Himalayas. The only dim light in the picture for me was that Southern India, especially around Bangalore, doesn’t seem as bad as Northern India. At least our loved ones living there aren’t as badly exposed.

The other picture captures is a good visualization of the history of global warming, including the different predicted outcomes based on various models and scenarios. This picture comes courtesy of the brilliant climate change site, Skepical Science, one site that attempts to synthesize all the climate change news – scientific and political – and present them in an easily comprehensible manner. I highly recommend readers to visit the blog for insightful information about climate change, including the basic facts.

From the blog entry:
“I love a simple, accessible graph that tells a clear story. A good example can be found in a new paper Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future (Chapman & Davis 2010). They plot past climate change over the past 1000 years together with what we can expect to experience over the next century. In a single figure, it tells us a number of stories which are fleshed out further in the paper.

The past 1000 years feature a number of temperature reconstructions (the thin coloured lines) using various proxies such as tree rings, corals, sediments, glacier length and boreholes. The black dotted line is the average temperature over the decade centered on 1 Jan 2000. Having a variety of independent proxy methods gives us confidence that current temperatures are warmer than any experienced over the past 1000 years.

The coloured areas represent future projections of global temperature. The yellow projection (C3) tells us what would happen if CO2 concentrations were held steady at year 2000 levels. In other words, what would happen if humanity had suddenly stopped emitting CO2 in the year 2000 (but it’s okay, we’d still be allowed to breath). Even in this imaginary case, temperatures would still continue to increase due to the thermal inertia of the oceans. ”

The third picture comes from the BBC, from a story titled, “Water Map Shows Billions At Risk of ‘Water Insecurity’“. Reporting on a story published in Nature this week, the article warns that more than 80% of the world’s population live in areas where the water source is insecure. They urge the developing nations, where the water insecurity is the highest, to not follow the lead of Western nations but “governments should invest in water management strategies that combine infrastructure with “natural” options such as safeguarding watersheds, wetlands and flood plains.” From the article:

“Looking at the “raw threats” to people’s water security – the “natural” picture – much of western Europe and North America appears to be under high stress.

However, when the impact of the infrastructure that distributes and conserves water is added in – the “managed” picture – most of the serious threat disappears from these regions.

Africa, however, moves in the opposite direction.

“The problem is, we know that a large proportion of the world’s population cannot afford these investments,” said Peter McIntyre from the University of Wisconsin, another of the researchers involved.

“In fact we show them benefiting less than a billion people, so we’re already excluding a large majority of the world’s population,” he told BBC News.”

Image courtesy of the BBC

“For developed countries and the Bric group – Brazil, Russia, India and China – alone, “$800bn per year will be required by 2015 to cover investments in water infrastructure, a target likely to go unmet,” they conclude.

For poorer countries, the outlook is considerably more bleak, they say.

“In reality this is a snapshot of the world about five or 10 years ago, because that’s the data that’s coming on line now,” said Dr McIntyre.

“It’s not about the future, but we would argue people should be even more worried if you start to account for climate change and population growth.

“Climate change is going to affect the amount of water that comes in as precipitation; and if you overlay that on an already stressed population, we’re rolling the dice.”

As I have penned before, these visualizations are not merely academic for me. They are an indicator of the kind of world we’re leaving behind for our children, for Maya. Attempting to provide for the most opportunities for our children is not just by sending them to good schools or ensuring that they eat well. If we don’t wake up and act, continue to deny and live our lives in ways that will create a world that is more poisoned and strife-ridden, we’d have acted less with love for our children.

Related articles by Zemanta:

Enhanced by Zemanta
Leave a Reply ?

We’ve Met The Paparazzi! They’re Us

Posted on August 26, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

“However well you write about your family or friends, you diminish them.”

I read this A.S. Byatt quote in an entry in one of The Guardian’s culture blogs.

I write with some reserve when I write about my personal life. I’m especially sensitive when I’m writing about others. I usually don’t name anybody but Shanthala and Maya, I occasionally refer directly to my parents, once or twice, I’ve said “neighbor”, and I think that’s it. For example, in my previous entry about the death of a colleague, I didn’t name her (yes, I did reveal her gender) or my friends through whom I learnt about the death.

Even when I write about Shanthala or Maya, I think if what I write will embarrass them, if not today, some day in the future. When I put up pictures of other people, I usually check with them first, though I’ve been less diligent about that. However, I don’t think that I have put up any possibly embarassing pictures of anybody except maybe myself (in which case, aren’t they all embarrassing, you may ask).

A friend seemed to echo Byatt’s sensibilities when he said that he wouldn’t have written personal entries such as the one I wrote about the evolution of my relationship with Shanthala from our first encounter to our wedding. Another expressed a similar sentiment over my writings about my grief over Kitty’s death.

I have benefited from reading about the experiences of other people. Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” or C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed” provide invaluable insights into the land of grief. They wrote both intensely and intimately about their grief and their relationship. In books such as “Elegy For Iris”, spouses write about what it is like to live with someone afflicted with horrifying diseases such as Alzheimer’s and plot the frightening descent of brilliant minds into unmind. Rafael Yglesias, in “A Happy Marriage”, documents intimate details of his marriage, both good and bad, in ways that illuminate the realities of a marriage. Kay Redfield Jamison writes about her struggles as a manic-depressive in “An Unquiet Mind”. She writes that writing that memoir put her in a difficult situation many times, but many thanked her for bringing out of the shadows the life of a manic-depressive. Gandhi’s “My Experiments With Truth” have helped me understand the perspective of this utterly unique individual.

What We Accept in Public Discourse

In the excellent, “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain De Botton, I was introduced to the ideas of the French essayist and philosopher, Michel de Montaigne. de Montaigne was a proponent of the fact that we’re far from perfect and that this aspect of our lives should not be shut away in closets and only our seemingly rational, methodical and picture perfect self presented to the world as proper. One of his more famous quotes is “Kings and philosophers shit; and so do ladies”. By stating front and center what people hitherto shied away from, he was bringing aspects of ourselves into discussion, and thereby out of the darkness. He wrote:
“The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation ? We are not afraid to utter the words kill, thieve or betray; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth.”

Alain de Botton himself eloquently adds: “If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves. What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.“

When Maya throws a temper tantrum when we open the crayon box that she wanted to open herself, a tantrum that abates in an instant and she’s smiling and happy, Shanthala and I worried about her. Are we raising her right ? Are we being too indulgent ? Is something the matter with her ? Then, when we talk to friends with kids of similar age and they tell us how their kids throw a similar tantrum over the shape of the pasta for dinner or not being allowed to pick the color of their milk bottle for the day, we heave a sigh of relief.

I could go on and on. The history of the autobiography is ancient even if the history of the memoir is somehow very 20th century (and early 21st). The world has changed in ways in which more and more people, even ordinary people, not just the rich and famous, have had the ability to get their narratives published. This has unleashed a glut of memoirs, many of which are tell-alls, meant to air dirty laundry in public rather than present a story or perspective of lasting value. As someone said, “We don’t apologize any more, we just write memoirs”.

But is there more to this sentiment than just personal views ? Is there some larger, more pragmatic consequence to writing about ourselves or framing ourselves publicly ?

The Age of Not Forgetting

Information on the web is around forever. With effective search engines such as google, it is not that hard to dig up information about a person if it was posted online. Many specialize in pulling together disparate pieces to construct a fairly detailed portrait of us. Those embarrassing pictures or midnight twitters stay around forever. NYT Magazine carried an article (when most of my news is read online and not on paper, is “carry” an uesful metaphor anymore?) about a month back titled “The Web Means the End of Forgetting”.

The article begins with the story of a teacher in training, a Stacy Snyder, who posted on MySpace a picture of her toting a drink wearing a cap that said “Drunken Pirate”. A supervisor at the high school she was training at found the picture, told her that she was promoting drinking and denied her a training degree. A federal circuit judge ruled against her case. The article cites other cases like Stacy’s including an employee who was fired because she wrote that she was bored on her Facebook page and a Canadian psychotherapist who was denied entry into the US because an online search by the immigration official revealed that he had published a paper 30 years ago on his experiences with LSD. What is next ? Non-immigrants denied entry for blogging critically about the US or US policy ?

Here is a scarier quote from the article:
“According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants, including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.”

The article goes on to state the dawn of companies like ReputationDefender that will clean up your online profile for a fee and ideas like “filing for reputation bankruptcy”. Jonathan Zittrain who reaches cyberlaw at Harvard speculates that in the future there will be companies like the financial credit rating firms, experian and equifax, that maintain the reputation rating of individuals. Here is his take as expressed in the article:
“Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute social measurements – like how often he or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using cellphones and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers – like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example, which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability.”

But despite warnings by privacy advocates and reports such as this one, people in ever increasing numbers continue to share ever increasing information about themselves. Why do we do this ? While there are reasons posited for uninhibited behavior online, I wonder if in cases of normal behavior, there are other factors at play.

  • Nature: We are social animals and so the need to share is probably primal.
  • Distance and Time: We’re moving farther and farther away from family members with each generation. Even friends are no longer a constant, past a certain age. And with the speed with which we live our lives, we have less time to engage socially with many of them. So, there is a need to share information with them by keeping them informed about our lives, something better than a once-a-year, Christmas postcard.
  • Ease Of Online Sharing: Internet provides a way to bridge that distance in a cheap and easy way. Before, I had to develop the picture that I just took of Maya, put it in an album and remember to show it to you when you visit the next time. Now, I just upload right off the iPhone or my digital camera, you’re notified of the new picture and you can see it whenever you want. The ease also means that I don’t have to think as much to post a picture online, promoting a “post first, think later” mindset.
  • Newness of the Medium: But, the newness of the medium prevents us from fully perceiving other possible effects of our desire to share. For example, if I was Stacy Snyder, I may put up a picture of myself on my Facebook page because someone thought that it was a cute picture of me and I wanted my dad to see it. I might not think that a supervisor at my school would find the picture and to top that, think that posting the picture meant I was encouraging underage drinking.
  • Ease of Discovering: When social sites such as Facebook make it hard to control what we want others to see and easy for others to spot us, we may inadvertently reveal more about ourselves than we care to. Also, before the onset of social media and Google, to know more about you, I had to know someone who knew you or knew someone who knew you. Now, it is easy to piece together a picture of someone using some quite basic tools.

So, unwittingly, we’ve become our own paparazzi. Or to rephrase Pogo: “We’ve met the paparazzi and they’re us”.

The NYT article quotes, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a cyberscholar and the author of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age“, about the dangers of this new world:
“By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

So, while I believe in writing candidly and on subjects that maybe painful or intensely personal, I exercise some restraint, cognizant that the web never forgets. But I don’t try to write to blame or titillate. I try and write non-polemically, but can’t say I succeed very well in that. But, I’m aligned with Michel de Montaigne’s sentiments rather than Byatt’s. I don’t think my writing diminishes my friends or family, only rounds them, presents them and me and our relationship in a real, three dimensional way, underscoring our humanity.

Image credit: Wikpedia’s entry on Pogo.

Leave a Reply ?

Behavioral Sciences are WEIRD (and MYOPICS)

Posted on August 12, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

The thought first occurred to me, back in the fall of 2008, as I was reading Dan Ariely’s very readable and fascinating book, “Predictably Irrational”. Chapter after chapter is peppered with conclusions drawn from experiments conducted on students studying at some of the best institutions in the US. I wrote an email to a couple of the authors of what I thought were well-respected blogs about the brain and behavior. I wrote:

“The more I read about our cognitive biases or irrationality, the more I’m struck by how many decisions have been reached using what seem fairly limited samples, many of them just college students. I don’t doubt that we’ve cognitive biases but I wonder are there any studies that go across cultures, socio-economic strata and age in determining the cognitive biases ? I googled and couldn’t find anything relevant. Is it that we all have the same cognitive biases but different ones are brought to the fore by culture ? ”

I did not get any responses to my question (they probably were optimistic that I’d learn to google better). But the feeling never went away as I encountered many new fascinating conclusions drawn from experiments conducted on college students in this country. As I was writing my entry about the death of languages, I noticed an article in that excellent blog, Neuroanthropology. While the title caught my eye, I didn’t really go back to checking the article until a few days later. The entry is titled: “We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?“. WEIRD turns out to be an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The article was based on a paper (then) recently published paper titled The weirdest people in the world? by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan.

There are two main points to this paper. The first is that a lot of conclusions in behavior science are based on experiments on WEIRD people, essentially undergrad students at Western, mostly American, universities. The second thrust of the paper is to show that WEIRD people are not representative of most of humanity when it comes to behaviors.

From the abstract of the paper:

“The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.  Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity.”

Two pieces of data from the article reflect the level of skewness in the papers related to behavior science:

  • “A recent analysis of the top journals in six sub-disciplines of psychology from 2003 to 2007 revealed that 68% of subjects came from the United States, and a full 96% of subjects were from Western industrialized countries, specifically those in North America and Europe, as well as Australia and Israel (Arnett 2008). The make-up of these samples appears to largely reflect the country of residence of the authors, as 73% of first authors were at American universities, and 99% were at universities in Western countries. This means that 96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population.”
  • “In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the premier journal in social psychology – the subdiscipline of psychology that should (arguably) be the most attentive to questions about the subjects’ backgrounds – 67% of the American samples (and 80% of the samples from other countries) were composed solely of undergraduates in psychology courses (Arnett 2008).”

These papers and their conclusions are not just academic papers published in academic journals for the consumption of academics. As the authors write: “In top journals such as Nature and Science, researchers frequently extend their findings from undergraduates to the species – often declaring this generalization in their titles. These  contributions typically lack even a cautionary footnote about these inferential extensions.”

The authors compare WEIRD people at four levels: western, industrialized countries vs what they term “small scale socieities”, Western industrialized countries vs non-Western, industrialized countries, American vs other western countries and finally university-educated Americans vs non-university-educated Americans. The authors base their comparisons on different aspects of behavior ranging from visual perception and spatial cognition to ideas of independence and inter-dependence and moral reasoning.

The main paper is a well written (I confess here that I only read sections of it, given my limited time and domain-specific competence) 22 pages or so. The reminder of the paper is a collection of responses from various peers to their paper and the authors’ response to the responses. Many of the responses apply the criticism to other areas such as neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy and the anthropocentric and ethnocentric attitudes related to comparing humans with other animals. Many responses question whether WEIRD is weird enough. For example, the author of the Neuroanthropology post writes:
“I worry that W.E.I.R.D. classification flatters the WEIRD, focusing on traits that Westerners typically highlight to describe themselves in ways that are, however inadvertently, pretty self-congratulatory. If we were to call the same group, Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary (MYOPICS)… you get the idea.”

A small section of the peer commentary argued against the conclusions of the article with one author even stating “WEIRD societies may be more compatible with human nature”.

In the main paper, the authors don’t attempt to explain the reasons behind the extreme differences in behavior of the WEIRD folks. But in their response to the various pieces of peer review, they touch upon this subject. They suggest two possible reasons. One is the primacy of the English language. They write: “English-bias may be impacting theorizing in the cognitive sciences, while Machery and Stich show that it has impacted philosophical inquiry”.

The second cause they speculate has to do with the relative strangeness of American middle and upper class child-rearing techniques. They write: “Lancy lays the groundwork by highlighting the relative strangeness, in a broad global and historical context, of modern middle- and upper-class American beliefs, values, cultural models, and practices vis-a-vis childrearing. Fernald and Karasik et al. review evidence that is beginning to document how these practices impact cognitive, linguistic, and motor development, including long-term cognitive outcomes.”

We’ve been here before. Many times have we encountered the notion of researcher bias and skew caused by the nature of the samples studied.

I first encountered the idea of researcher bias many years ago when I was reading Dorothy Rowe’s insightful book, “Friends and Enemies: Our Need To Love and Hate”. She writes: “An American researcher observing a number of white, middle-class American babies, or an English researcher observing a number of white, middle-class English babies can easily fail to draw the simple conclusion that this is what American or English middle-class babies do and instead generalize their observations to say that this is what all babies do.”

A more tragic story is narrated by Robert Sapolsky in his essay “Poverty’s Remains” from his book, “The Trouble With Testosterone”. Much of our understanding of human anatomy was initially based on cadavers of poor people whose internal organs were differently shaped and sized because of the way they suffered and died. Sapolsky quotes several examples of this from the thymus gland which is very small in people who live in chronically stressful conditions to the adrenal gland which is much larger in people living under stressful conditions. So, at the turn of the 19th century, the doctors had a misconceived notion of the “normal” size of organs.

Before SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) was called SIDS, an Austrian pathologist named Richard Paltauf concluded – after several autopsies of healthy infants who had died of unexplainable causes in their crib – that the cause of death was an enlarged thymus that pressed down on the trachea, strangling a sleeping infant. SIDS, which had been nameless thus far, was called status thymicolymphaticus and as far as into the 1950s, the preferred preventive treatment for SIDS was to irradiate the throats of infants. While not helping SIDS, the treatment resulted in causing thyroid cancer in tens of thousands of people. Sapolsky writes: “It is a chilling experience to wander the dusty lower floor of a medical library, reading forgotten seventy-year-old pediatric texts with their dry discussions of status thymicolymphaticus. The technical details of the disorder, the plausible etiology, the photographs of the “enlarged” thymuses, the confident recommendation for treatment – all wrong, page after page.”

More recently, at the start of the year, NYT published an article titled “The Americanization of Mental Illness”:
“AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. 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.”

I cannot recommend the WEIRD paper highly enough to anybody engaged in an enquiry of human behavior, as a vocation or an avocation. I’ve saved a copy of the paper for a more thorough reading. I also recommend reading the post on Neuroanthropology for some additional insightful commentary.

Sapolsky concludes his essay “Poverty’s Remains” with a powerful and eloquent statement: “Be really certain before you ever pronounce something to be the norm, because at that instant, you have now made it supremely difficult to ever look at an exception to that supposed norm and see it objectively.”

[ 3 Replies ]