Today I Learned...

Eh, it's all right. I wish there were enough decent sex-science writing I could blow it off for not only using Alfred Kinsey's quantitative data, but praising it, but there isn't, so I'm forced to see it's better points: it approaches the subject amorally while respecting the importance of morals, it taught me a fact I so *want* to be true even though I looked up the original reference and it appears to be shakier than he claimed (foot fetishism peaks during STD epidemics), and its consideration of proper moral handling of pedophilia is pretty nuanced.

Actually, let's talk about that. The data is pretty strong that:

• A sexual attraction to children (pedophilia) is as out of conscious control as any other sexual attraction
  
• It is possible to have these thoughts, recognize that acting on them is immoral, and refrain from doing so.
  
• The available data is excruciatingly limited, but appears to point to access to child porn leads pedophiles to be less likely to attack an actual child, not more.
  
• The stigma against pedophilia makes it very hard to pedophiles to seek out the kind of help that would strengthen their resistance to their urge to act with an actual child.
  

Hypothetically, what if we legalized simulated child porn (so no actual kids are abused in production), but only for people who registered as official pedophiles? If we managed to keep the consequences to registering reasonable (e.g. it only blocked you from jobs that brought you into contact with children), it could make everyone better off. You might think no one would ever go for it, but if you allow for a concept of pedophiles that includes well meaning people tortured by the corruption of one of the strongest drives in the human soul, it could work. It allows people to simultaneously get some relief while giving their current, morally strong self a way to block their future, weaker self from temptation. And if you ever found an unregistered pedophile in possession of child porn you could feel more justified in throwing the book at him, because the only reason not to be on the list is to have access to children.

Obviously we can't get there from here, but I like it as a thought experiment.

Okay, new rule: I'm not allowed to discuss behavioral biology on a first date, and I am especially not allowed to discuss Sex at Dawn. In fact, I should probably avoid either topic until I'm officially friends with someone.

The problem I run into is that behavioral biology was My Thing for 10 years. I didn't work in it after college, but it's a systemic way of thinking that has never left me. Citing homosexuality as evidence evolution's powers are limited hurts me almost physically, like telling a physicist that the existence of airplanes mean they're overestimating gravity's importance.* I am pathologically uninterested in having a discussion on the topic with someone who doesn't understand it. Even people who think they are agreeing with me tend to be frustrating, because they're still ignorant about the system as a whole. I am totally happy to teach the topic, but very few people want to hear a lecture.

Although now that I think about it, I do like being lectured. I freaking love finding people who know so much more about a topic that the best use of our time is for them to expand on it and me to ask questions. And I would say the same thing about most, maybe all, of my friends. We love both sharing things we know lots about and learning new things from people who know lots about them.

I still need to learn to say "I studied this topic and find Sex at Dawn lacking as an academic text, but I respect that many people have found a lot of value in it." But perhaps the solution to the other question is not to avoid talking about my areas of expertise, but to continue using "tell me something you find interesting" as a conversational opener.

*For the record: evolution means change in allele frequency over time. It's not a driver of change, it's a shorthand for the results of change. If you believe genetics affect survival and reproduction, and you believe the environment changes, your choices are evolution and pixie dust.

Given this, you have 2 choices for explaining the existence of homosexuality: it is adaptive in certain circumstances, or it is a non-adaptive side effect of something adaptive. To take the easier example of Down's Syndrome: DS is clearly maladaptive, but it is still the result of a process shaped by adaptation, which includes weighing the cost of errors against the costs of avoiding or fixing them. An airplane's chairs don't have much to do with gravity, but they're still shaped by the fact that an airplane is designed to stay aloft against a force that wants it down. Similarly, airplane seats have nothing to do with gravity per se, but the fact that it is extremely expensive to defy gravity puts pressure to fit as many people into the plane, and the superiority of air travel to other options for traveling long distances limits counter pressure, so seats shrink.

$tud: adventures in breeding is a pretty good specimen of a type of book I am a sucker for. It takes a topic that is not innately interesting to layman (the breeding of thoroughbred horses) and delivers information in a light, informative way. It doesn't do this perfectly, but it's a difficult skill, and if you're looking for something that will engage your brain without tiring it out, it's a respectable choice.

In general, what I learned is that the world of horse breeding is fucked. Perverted, in the oldest, truest sense of the term. There is something deeply broken about a system in which you end up with five human beings maneuvering to help horses have sex. It would be one thing if we were engaging skilled horse penis handlers* because we lived in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where the horses we depended on to carry news and medicine were mutated to near-behavioral-sterility. At that point, I can see horse penis handling being a valued and even prestigious skill. But we let these horses lose their courtship instincts because we like watching them run in circles really fast. If all the horse penis handlers were suddenly called up to go to war, and we were only able to breed stallions that could find the vagina on their own, we would not suffer. We would not suffer even if the next generation of horses ran around in circles at a slightly reduced speed. It's such a waste of human potential.

The system is made worse by what an incredibly long tail of value horses have. You could leave a stallion out with a group of mares and get the whole process done a lot less human intervention, but 1. humans don't want to waste any precious, precious horse semen on pregnant mares and 2. you risk injury to the horses. These are not cheap horses. At his peak, Storm Cat was bringing in one million a day during breeding season. Even wild horses occasionally injure each other in social and especially breeding interactions, and thoroughbreds are considerably more likely to do so because they're so high strung (because we bred them for speed). So they tie the mare down and use teaser stallions and the stallions end up behaviorally incompetent because they're in such an artificial situation. And the thoroughbred ruling body bans artificial insemination because they think live breeding keeps the breed natural.

Applying concepts like rape to animals is difficult and fraught. But wild and even most domesticated horses have mating rituals in which the female exhibits choice. And in breeding thoroughbreds, we take that choice away from them. We tie mares down specifically to prevent them from leaving or fighting back. If we were doing this with the intention of beating an animal, it would be recognized as morally wrong and illegal. If we tied them up for a human to sexually penetrate them, it would be recognized as wrong and (in some states) illegal. But somehow, it's okay if it's another member of the same species assaulting them. This too strikes me as wrong.

*No, seriously. Someone has to help the stallion aim, and if he's got a large penis or the mare is fragile, someone else has to hold up some sort of padding to keep him from thrusting too deep.

One potential treatment for cancer is to infect the patient with a virus that kills only cancer cells. But in practice, we've only ever seen temporary gains from this, in part because it's so hard to distribute the virus to every cancer cell.

Another potential treatment is to irradiate the patient nearly to death, which kills the cancer but also their immune system. You can give them a donor immune system, but that's incredibly vulnerable to graft vs. host syndrome. You can extract and save part of their own immune system, but risk a sample contaminated with cancer. Until you can guarantee that the sample is cancer free, the treatment is unusable.

What they're testing right now is extracting a bone marrow sample, treating the sample with the anti-cancer virus, irradiating the the cancer patient, and then reintroducing the sample that you can now guarantee is cancer free. It's so absolutely brilliant I could cry.

I'm a big believer in using evolution as a lens to understand human behavior. For example: I have friends who go on multi day hiking/camping extravaganzas in groups of 3-6. None of them would mind if someone said "I'm tired, let's slow down". They would consider someone who did mind an asshole. And yet, to the one, they need to be near dying before they'll ask the group to rest. This seems illogical, but makes sense if you think about when humans lived in small, interdependent tribes, where being the weak one would be held against you- if not then, then eventually. And this explanation is useful, because it calms me down about speaking up in such a situation.

But here's the thing. There are some very good evolutionary reasons to avoid smearing feces in your mouth. And I, like nearly all other people, have an aversion to doing so that feels so strong it must be inborn. But if you look at young children: it's not inborn. They have to be taught an aversion to feces. And saying they lack the intelligence isn't a valid argument, because it's incredibly easy to evolve instinctive reactions to smells, and "don't touch it" or "don't touch your mouth" are pretty simple reactions.

This casts some real doubts on more complicated hypotheses, like "men should be more promiscuous than women". There are arguments for it that look valid. They feel true. But there are historical periods where the exact opposite was considered true. Of course historical people are idiots, but... humans are really complicated. And kids eat poop.

Do you know where the phrase "Natural Selection" comes from? Darwin was attempting to distinguish the artificial breeding managed by humans from what was going on the wild. No where is this clearer to me then when I look at my cat Pan, a being that would last about five minutes in the wild. It actually says that in the breed description "Do not let them outside. Their only defense is a quizzical stare." These cats have had every bit of fight bred out of them, and replaced with pure love. It's not a bad strategy, as these things go. But Pan may have taken it too far.

First there is feeding him. I had three different types of food on a plate in front of him, all of which are things he has likes, topped with whipped cream, which he loves. Wouldn't touch it. Whined for food, wouldn't touch it. I place a small amount of food in a different bowl, warm it a bit, and place it next to the plate. Suddenly he's all about the original food on the original plate. It's worse right now because he's feeling icky, but even at the best of times it takes more work to feed him than mother nature is going to put in.

He's only just getting some weight back on after May's shitting blood/refusing to eat episode, and now we're entering a pissing (minute quantities of) blood/frequent vomiting phase that is bad enough he's locked in the bathroom when I'm not watching him. I just got the results back from the vet that clearly something was wrong with his bladder but they needed more tests to determine what. Fingers crossed for a UTI that is making him vomit from pain, which is a single cause we can easily fix.

My point is, don't get purebred cats out of the discount bin.

Did you know that heritable, as in h^2, the scientific measure of heritability, has a very little in common with what we would think of as genetic determinism? Heritability is simply the measure of how much offspring resemble their parents, relative to the range in the population. Not even how predictive a parent's trait value is for their offspring, just how similar they are.

This has a bunch of weird consequences. For example, in the Netherlands, skin tone has a higher heritability value in the winter, because in the summer young people tan more and it destroys the correlation between their tone and their parents'. Even more counter intuitive, sex has a heritability value of 0, because everyone has a parent of each sex.* Number of arms at birth is barely heritable, in that there are certain heritable defects that make you more prone to having less than two arms, but they're so rare they barely create a range for us to consider.

Also, and this is important, heritability is only valid in the environment it is measured. A given trait is more heritable when the environment is more consistent. So when you see adoption studies saying parenting doesn't matter that much, what they mean is that across the variations in parenting seen in families that adoption agencies found worthy, parenting style doesn't matter much.

*This absolutely has to be true as a consequence of how sex is defined biologically, regardless of the gender identity of either parent.

Warning: possible overgeneralization from my own experiences.

Background: from ages 12-21, I wanted to be a scientist. I left because it turns out science is a spectacularly crappy career, but I still feel some kinship with it.

Opening anecdote: One day in my sociobiology class, our lecturer described a particular experiment demonstrating that people are more friendly towards those who share their name, more so with last than with first, more so still if it's a rare name. The experiment was elegant, required a minimum of effort, and got the undergraduate experimenter published in Nature. For those who don't follow these things: that's roughly equivalent to throwing the winning pitch at the World Series at 17. My friend and I turned to each other and, in unison, mouthed the words "that bitch."

My point is, scientists are competitive. They care about truth and knowledge and expanding human horizons... but they also care that they're the one to do it. It's almost tautological, because while I'm sure there are many excellent scientists who don't care that much, they tend to get scooped. What's worse, there tends to be a particular moment for a particular discovery, and while 99.99999% of human beings are still incapable of finding it, there are still three or four other people with the knowledge, inclination, and equipment, and if any one of them beats you, you might as well be one of the 99.99999%. That was some of the lesson of Quicksilver*: you have all these brilliant minds coming at once and then they waste their time competing with each other and hiding results so the others can't steal them.

This feels like a pretty lonely limb, but I think that's why scientists are so quick to beat down Henrietta Lacks (the woman whose cancer cells went on to be the first and most productive line of cultured human cells). These men* gave their entire lives to something that has minimal financial reward (relative to what else someone with that level of intelligence could do) and is really only prestigious within a small subculture. They did it because they wanted to discover things, wanted to contribute, and wanted the respect of that subculture. They did at the expense of years and years of their lives. Then this woman comes along and contributes about as much to medical science as a nobel prize winner, and she didn't have to sacrifice a damn thing.***

I think researchers try to anonymize and deemphasize the source of their data- the human beings- because they don't want to share the credit. Human instinct is to give the biggest rewards to the person who made the most sacrifice, and giving part of their body feels like a bigger contribution than collating some data, even if the scientist provided the spark of insight and any old human could have donated blood. Knowing this, the scientists dehumanize the donors in an attempt to bring prestige/credit/ownership to themselves.

I'm basing this in part on my own feelings. While listening to the book there's a thread in me saying "why are we paying attention to her? She didn't do anything, she didn't choose anything, she was just in the right place at the right time to have something happen to her?" She has an interesting story, and it's pretty illustrative of a lot of things that were wrong with America at the time and are not as fixed as we like to think, but why is her story more interesting than any of the thousands of other poor black women who went to that same medical clinic? Why should she get remembered and they don't?

And the answer is... because. Because even without bringing metaphysics into it, it is good to cultivate an attitude of respect for people who contribute to things. It's good for the soul to know the web of connections you're living in, and bad to disregard people who made substantive contributions to it. Overruling that voice saying "but she contributed the actual living cells" comes at a real psychic cost.

Okay, that got dramatically less articulate at the end but I've still got a good 2/3 of the book left so maybe I'll figure out some more later.


*This is one reason I don't manage to keep my reading on theme. It's more fun coming up with connections between whichever books arrive at the library together

**The women scientists are likely to be even less happy with her, since they faced many more obstacles than the men.

***I mean, she did die at 30. But it wasn't intentional so it doesn't count.

If it were up to me, the FDA would be run completely differently. For one thing, I really don't care how much pain medicine you take. I would allow adults to purchase heroin over the counter. Chemo? Well, I don't recommend taking it without a doctor's prescription, but sure, knock yourself out. And this whole drug approval process is insane: to get approval, you have to prove your drug is strictly better than other drugs in the class on the market. This is stupid. Humans are highly variable, just because something is worse on average doesn't mean it's not The Drug for one particular person- I'm eternally grateful for the fact that 3 or 4 different allergy drugs went on the market at the same time, because I built up an immunity to each of them in a year or two. At my peak I was taking three and my allergies still weren't under control (the eventual solution turned out to be non-pharmaceutical). If the FDA had only approved the best in class drug, I literally may not have been able to finish high school; my allergies were that bad. And I'll decide if the pain relief I get from Vioxx is worth the potential heart attack, thank you very much*.

The FDA doesn't even do what it does very well. Did you know you don't submit a study to the FDA until after it's complete? So you can just not report a particular study and it doesn't count. What the fuck? If my world, the FDA would by and large be a data collection agency: the drug companies would register their studies before they even started, and report the results at the end. The FDA would collate those results to make them accessible to doctors, possibly also providing comparisons to similar drugs, and let doctors and patients make informed decisions.

But the FDA's real failure is in antibiotics. A government agency tasked with controlling access to drugs doesn't give a fuck about the overuse of the only drugs that have genuine negative externalities. And it's going to kill us if they don't stop.

That's probably alarmist. There are many decision points between now and death by superbug. We've gotten lazy about hygiene in the absence of insects and the presence of antibiotics. But the FDA's priorities are so very wrong in this case.

The solution isn't actually obvious though. As long as doctors are the gatekeepers, they have an incentive to give antibiotics to patients with viral infections to make them shut up. You could make them more expensive, but the middle class and above won't notice unless you make very specific laws about the insurance, and it has obvious repercussions for the poor. My usual answer to issues like that is "price things appropriately and give the poor more money", and maybe that works in this case too (antibiotic use has a negative externality, so it is good candidate for taxation), but it's not the same as a gas tax. You can force people to get N sick before giving them antibiotics, but that might actually make the problem worse. Ditto for making people afraid of superbugs- they'll ask for stronger antibiotics before they stop taking them needlessly.

The fact that most viable option I can think of is lacing antibiotics with something with unpleasant side effects is not a good sign. On the other hand, there is precedent: vicodin has ibuprofin in it not for the theraputic effects, but to give you liver damage if you take too much. Thanks FDA.

59 Seconds continues to commit the two major sins of happiness research: Confusing The Number Circles On The Form With Genuine Long Term Happiness, and Telling Stories. Let's tackle the stories first. There is at least one study, and possibly many (can't check, I'm listening to it on CD), showing that when people discuss a frustrating event with friends they leave the same or less happy, but when they write down the event they feel better afterwards. Technically the only facts are the exact numbers that came out of each study, but let's assume it's been replicated enough that we can call writing=feel better, talking=feel worse a fact. We can't, for a lot of reasons, but I can't get distracted by that right now. Because even if that were true, the researchers explanation for it- "talking just reminds people of things, writing makes them form a narrative"- is completely unfounded. To test that, you'd have to look at things like "what if we tell people to just complain when they write?", "what if we tell people to tell their friends stories?", "what if they read the helpful diary entry to a friend?" Until then, the explanation is just a story.

And then there's the second sin, which I'm going to expand into a a general "extrapolaing from a distorted view of a single moment in time to all of eternity." My other book right now is Crucial Conversations. It doesn't have any scientific citations, but it is the only book on interpersonal skills I have ever found at all useful*, and that's even better. Technically, Crucial Conversations is telling the same story telling sin I accuse 59 seconds of, but it doesn't bother me because 1. it's not claiming to discuss specific studies, just trends, and 2. I can absolutely see how the stories they are true about my life and the corrections they suggest will make my life better. So I guess 59 Second's sin isn't telling stories, it's telling useless stories.

I apologize for using the word "story" in both the metadiscussion and the specific discussion, because it's rapidly going to stop looking like a word. But soldiering on: one of the brilliant points in Crucial Conversations is that when we have an interaction with someone that goes poorly, we tell ourselves a story about why it happened. The fact is that the coworker excluded you from a conversation, the story is that he's doing it deliberately to cut you out because you're a woman. You could just as easily tell a story that he'd heard you were nervous and wanted to help you, or is a nervous talker and feels like shit now. You have to watch the stories you tell very carefully***, or you'll act inappropriately to the situation. But we tell these stories because in the short term, they make us feel better. SO it seems entirely plausible to me that people feel better immediately after writing down a negative event, because they've now got the fairy tale written, staring them, but that this locks them into repeating the same mistake over again.

59 Seconds briefly rallied by providing scientific justification for a story I believe: the Getting Things Done Philosophy, in which storing information in your brain is anathema because it uses valuable mental ram, and you should do everything in your power to break things into loops you can offload onto storage and close as quickly as possible, because unclosed loops = occupied RAM = more stress + lowered productivity. Apparently the whole mental RAM thing is totally true: you do hold certain information and intentions in your brain until the whole project is finished, and then quickly wipe them. But Wiseman goes in the exact opposite direction for GTD on this: he suggests that procrastinators lie to themselves and say they'll work on a project for "just a few minutes", counting on the fact that once they start they won't be able to stop until they're done. That seems like a great plan. The first time. But it seems like over time it would increase your resistance to starting anything. But Wiseman doesn't know that because he hasn't looked past the first attempt

*this sounds like damning with faint praise, but I'm actually finding it extremely interesting and expect it to be extremely useful when I have a chance to put it into practice.**

**I've had this rant building for a while. I didn't share it because I'm trying not to rant but... screw it. I've basically given up on anything with "for introverts" in the title because they're inevitably written by extroverts. Now, extroverts are not bad people. Some of my best friends are extroverts. And I'm willing to concede that their extroversion makes them more successful at particular things and/or happier at life in general. But, and extroverted authors listen up because this is the critical point, just like you can't make pessimists happier by forcing them to pretend to be optimists, you can't make introverts happier by making them pretend to be extroverts. My goal is not to be more like you, it's to make being me easier. Being you just seems exhausting.

***Wow, this is getting all circular. I only just noticed that this is exactly the Sin of Story Telling I described in the first paragraph.