Atul Gawande
The New Yorker
Originally published June 2, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
We’ve divided the world into us versus them—an ever-shrinking population of good people against bad ones. But it’s not a dichotomy. People can be doers of good in many circumstances. And they can be doers of bad in others. It’s true of all of us. We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.
Regarding people as having lives of equal worth means recognizing each as having a common core of humanity. Without being open to their humanity, it is impossible to provide good care to people—to insure, for instance, that you’ve given them enough anesthetic before doing a procedure. To see their humanity, you must put yourself in their shoes. That requires a willingness to ask people what it’s like in those shoes. It requires curiosity about others and the world beyond your boarding zone.
We are in a dangerous moment because every kind of curiosity is under attack—scientific curiosity, journalistic curiosity, artistic curiosity, cultural curiosity. This is what happens when the abiding emotions have become anger and fear. Underneath that anger and fear are often legitimate feelings of being ignored and unheard—a sense, for many, that others don’t care what it’s like in their shoes. So why offer curiosity to anyone else?
Once we lose the desire to understand—to be surprised, to listen and bear witness—we lose our humanity. Among the most important capacities that you take with you today is your curiosity. You must guard it, for curiosity is the beginning of empathy. When others say that someone is evil or crazy, or even a hero or an angel, they are usually trying to shut off curiosity. Don’t let them. We are all capable of heroic and of evil things. No one and nothing that you encounter in your life and career will be simply heroic or evil. Virtue is a capacity. It can always be lost or gained. That potential is why all of our lives are of equal worth.
The article is here.
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
What does a portrait of Erica the android tell us about being human?
Nigel Warburton
The Guardian
Originally posted September 9, 2017
Here are two excerpts:
Another traditional answer to the question of what makes us so different, popular for millennia, has been that humans have a non-physical soul, one that inhabits the body but is distinct from it, an ethereal ghostly wisp that floats free at death to enjoy an after-life which may include reunion with other souls, or perhaps a new body to inhabit. To many of us, this is wishful thinking on an industrial scale. It is no surprise that survey results published last week indicate that a clear majority of Britons (53%) describe themselves as non-religious, with a higher percentage of younger people taking this enlightened attitude. In contrast, 70% of Americans still describe themselves as Christians, and a significant number of those have decidedly unscientific views about human origins. Many, along with St Augustine, believe that Adam and Eve were literally the first humans, and that everything was created in seven days.
(cut)
Today a combination of evolutionary biology and neuroscience gives us more plausible accounts of what we are than Descartes did. These accounts are not comforting. They reverse the priority and emphasise that we are animals and provide no evidence for our non-physical existence. Far from it. Nor are they in any sense complete, though there has been great progress. Since Charles Darwin disabused us of the notion that human beings are radically different in kind from other apes by outlining in broad terms the probable mechanics of evolution, evolutionary psychologists have been refining their hypotheses about how we became this kind of animal and not another, why we were able to surpass other species in our use of tools, communication through language and images, and ability to pass on our cultural discoveries from generation to generation.
The article is here.
The Guardian
Originally posted September 9, 2017
Here are two excerpts:
Another traditional answer to the question of what makes us so different, popular for millennia, has been that humans have a non-physical soul, one that inhabits the body but is distinct from it, an ethereal ghostly wisp that floats free at death to enjoy an after-life which may include reunion with other souls, or perhaps a new body to inhabit. To many of us, this is wishful thinking on an industrial scale. It is no surprise that survey results published last week indicate that a clear majority of Britons (53%) describe themselves as non-religious, with a higher percentage of younger people taking this enlightened attitude. In contrast, 70% of Americans still describe themselves as Christians, and a significant number of those have decidedly unscientific views about human origins. Many, along with St Augustine, believe that Adam and Eve were literally the first humans, and that everything was created in seven days.
(cut)
Today a combination of evolutionary biology and neuroscience gives us more plausible accounts of what we are than Descartes did. These accounts are not comforting. They reverse the priority and emphasise that we are animals and provide no evidence for our non-physical existence. Far from it. Nor are they in any sense complete, though there has been great progress. Since Charles Darwin disabused us of the notion that human beings are radically different in kind from other apes by outlining in broad terms the probable mechanics of evolution, evolutionary psychologists have been refining their hypotheses about how we became this kind of animal and not another, why we were able to surpass other species in our use of tools, communication through language and images, and ability to pass on our cultural discoveries from generation to generation.
The article is here.
Monday, July 2, 2018
Eugenics never went away
Robert A Wilson
aeon.com
Originally posted June 5, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
Eugenics survivors are those who have lived through eugenic interventions, which typically begin with being categorised as less than fully human – as ‘feeble-minded’, as belonging to a racialised ethnic group assumed to be inferior, or as having a medical condition, such as epilepsy, presumed to be heritable. That categorisation enters them into a eugenics pipeline.
Each such pipeline has a distinctive shape. The Alberta pipeline involved institutionalisation at training schools for the ‘feeble-minded’ or mentally deficient, followed by a recommendation of sterilisation by a medical superintendent, which was then approved by the Eugenics Board, and executed without consent. Alberta’s introduction of guidance clinics also allowed eugenic sterilisation to reach into the non-institutionalised population, particularly schools.
What roles have the stories of eugenics survivors played in understanding eugenics? For the most part and until recently, these first-person narratives have been absent from the historical study of eugenics. On its traditional view, according to which eugenics ended around 1945, this is entirely understandable. The number of survivors dwindles over time, and those who survived often chose, as did many in Alberta, to bracket off rather than re-live their past. Yet the limited presence of survivor narratives in the study of eugenics also stems from a corresponding limit in the safe and receptive audience for those narratives.
What Does an Infamous Biohacker’s Death Mean for the Future of DIY Science?
Kristen Brown
The Atlantic
Originally posted May 5, 2018
Here are two excerpts:
At just 28, Traywick was among the most infamous figures in the world of biohacking—the grandiose CEO of a tiny company called Ascendance Biomedical whose goal was to develop and test new gene therapies without the expense and rigor of clinical trials or the oversight of the FDA. Traywick wanted to cure cancer, herpes, HIV, and even aging, and he wanted to do it without having to deal with the rules and safety precautions of regulators and industry standards.
“There are breakthroughs in the world that we can actually bring to market in a way that wouldn’t require us to butt up against the FDA’s walls, but instead walk around them,” Traywick told me the first time I met him in person, during a biotech conference in San Francisco last January.
To “walk around” regulators, Ascendance and other biohackers typically rely on testing products on themselves. Self-experimentation, although strongly discouraged by agencies like the FDA, makes it difficult for regulators to intervene. The rules that govern drug development simply aren’t written to oversee what an individual might do to themselves.
(cut)
The biggest shame, said Zayner, is that we’ll never get the chance to see how Traywick might have matured once he’d been in the biohacking sphere a little longer.
Whatever their opinion of Traywick, everyone who knew him agreed that he was motivated by an extreme desire to make drugs more widely available for those who need them.
The information is here.
The Atlantic
Originally posted May 5, 2018
Here are two excerpts:
At just 28, Traywick was among the most infamous figures in the world of biohacking—the grandiose CEO of a tiny company called Ascendance Biomedical whose goal was to develop and test new gene therapies without the expense and rigor of clinical trials or the oversight of the FDA. Traywick wanted to cure cancer, herpes, HIV, and even aging, and he wanted to do it without having to deal with the rules and safety precautions of regulators and industry standards.
“There are breakthroughs in the world that we can actually bring to market in a way that wouldn’t require us to butt up against the FDA’s walls, but instead walk around them,” Traywick told me the first time I met him in person, during a biotech conference in San Francisco last January.
To “walk around” regulators, Ascendance and other biohackers typically rely on testing products on themselves. Self-experimentation, although strongly discouraged by agencies like the FDA, makes it difficult for regulators to intervene. The rules that govern drug development simply aren’t written to oversee what an individual might do to themselves.
(cut)
The biggest shame, said Zayner, is that we’ll never get the chance to see how Traywick might have matured once he’d been in the biohacking sphere a little longer.
Whatever their opinion of Traywick, everyone who knew him agreed that he was motivated by an extreme desire to make drugs more widely available for those who need them.
The information is here.
Sunday, July 1, 2018
What Trump Administration Corruption Lays Bare: Ineffectual Ethics Rules
Eliza Newlin Carney
The American Prospect
Originally published June 28, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
What’s most stunning about Pruitt’s never-ending ethics saga is not the millions in taxpayer dollars he wasted on first-class, military and private travel to exotic locales, on ‘round the clock security details and on over-the-top office furnishings. The real shocker is that federal ethics officials, having amassed an extraordinary paper trail showing that Pruitt violated multiple rules that bar self-dealing, employee retaliation, unauthorized pay raises and more, have been essentially helpless to do anything about it.
And therein lies the root problem exposed by this administration’s utter disregard for ethics norms: Executive Branch ethics laws are alarmingly weak and out of date. For decades, ethics watchdogs have warned Congress that a patchwork of agencies and officers scattered throughout the government lack the resources and authority to really police federal ethics violations. But since past administrations have typically paid a bit more attention to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), which oversees executive branch ethics programs, the holes in federal oversight have gone largely unnoticed.
But now that we have a president who, along with much of his cabinet, appears entirely impervious to the OGE’s guidelines and warnings, as well as to a torrent of unfavorable news coverage, the system’s shortfalls have become impossible to ignore. In theory, the Justice Department, the Office of White House Counsel, or Congress could fill in the gaps to help check this administration’s abuses. But none of Trump’s Hill allies or administration appointees has shown the slightest inclination to hold him to account.
The information is here.
The American Prospect
Originally published June 28, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
What’s most stunning about Pruitt’s never-ending ethics saga is not the millions in taxpayer dollars he wasted on first-class, military and private travel to exotic locales, on ‘round the clock security details and on over-the-top office furnishings. The real shocker is that federal ethics officials, having amassed an extraordinary paper trail showing that Pruitt violated multiple rules that bar self-dealing, employee retaliation, unauthorized pay raises and more, have been essentially helpless to do anything about it.
And therein lies the root problem exposed by this administration’s utter disregard for ethics norms: Executive Branch ethics laws are alarmingly weak and out of date. For decades, ethics watchdogs have warned Congress that a patchwork of agencies and officers scattered throughout the government lack the resources and authority to really police federal ethics violations. But since past administrations have typically paid a bit more attention to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), which oversees executive branch ethics programs, the holes in federal oversight have gone largely unnoticed.
But now that we have a president who, along with much of his cabinet, appears entirely impervious to the OGE’s guidelines and warnings, as well as to a torrent of unfavorable news coverage, the system’s shortfalls have become impossible to ignore. In theory, the Justice Department, the Office of White House Counsel, or Congress could fill in the gaps to help check this administration’s abuses. But none of Trump’s Hill allies or administration appointees has shown the slightest inclination to hold him to account.
The information is here.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
The Ethics of Ceding More Power To Machines
Brhmie Balaram
www.theRSA.org
Originally posted May 31, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
This gets to the crux of people’s fears about AI – there is a perception that we may be ceding too much power to AI, regardless of the reality. The public’s concerns seem to echo that of the academic Virginia Eubanks, who argues that the fundamental problem with these systems is that they enable the ethical distance needed “to make inhuman choices about who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, whose family stays together and whose is broken up by the state.”
Yet, these systems also have the potential to increase the fairness of outcomes if they are able to improve accuracy and minimise biases. They may also increase efficiency and savings for both the organisation that deploys the systems, as well as the people subject to the decision.
These are the sorts of trade-offs that a public dialogue, and in particular, a long-form deliberative process like a citizens’ jury, can address.
The info is here.
www.theRSA.org
Originally posted May 31, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
This gets to the crux of people’s fears about AI – there is a perception that we may be ceding too much power to AI, regardless of the reality. The public’s concerns seem to echo that of the academic Virginia Eubanks, who argues that the fundamental problem with these systems is that they enable the ethical distance needed “to make inhuman choices about who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, whose family stays together and whose is broken up by the state.”
Yet, these systems also have the potential to increase the fairness of outcomes if they are able to improve accuracy and minimise biases. They may also increase efficiency and savings for both the organisation that deploys the systems, as well as the people subject to the decision.
These are the sorts of trade-offs that a public dialogue, and in particular, a long-form deliberative process like a citizens’ jury, can address.
The info is here.
Friday, June 29, 2018
Business Class
John Benjamin
The New Republic
Originally posted May 14, 2018
Students in the country’s top MBA programs pride themselves on their open-mindedness. This is, after all, what they’ve been sold: American business schools market their ability to train the kinds of broadly competent, intellectually receptive people that will help solve the problems of a global economy.
But in truth, MBA programs are not the open forums advertised in admissions brochures. Behind this façade, they are ideological institutions committed to a strict blend of social liberalism and economic conservatism. Though this fusion may be the favorite of American elites—the kinds of people who might repeat that tired line “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative”—it takes a strange form in business school. Elite business schooling is tailored to promote two types of solutions to the big problems that arise in society: either greater innovation or freer markets. Proposals other than what’s essentially more business are brushed aside, or else patched over with a type of liberal politics that’s heavy on rhetorical flair but light on relevance outside privileged circles.
It is in this closed ideological loop that we wannabe masters of the universe often struggle to think clearly about the common good or what it takes to achieve it.
The information is here.
The New Republic
Originally posted May 14, 2018
Students in the country’s top MBA programs pride themselves on their open-mindedness. This is, after all, what they’ve been sold: American business schools market their ability to train the kinds of broadly competent, intellectually receptive people that will help solve the problems of a global economy.
But in truth, MBA programs are not the open forums advertised in admissions brochures. Behind this façade, they are ideological institutions committed to a strict blend of social liberalism and economic conservatism. Though this fusion may be the favorite of American elites—the kinds of people who might repeat that tired line “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative”—it takes a strange form in business school. Elite business schooling is tailored to promote two types of solutions to the big problems that arise in society: either greater innovation or freer markets. Proposals other than what’s essentially more business are brushed aside, or else patched over with a type of liberal politics that’s heavy on rhetorical flair but light on relevance outside privileged circles.
It is in this closed ideological loop that we wannabe masters of the universe often struggle to think clearly about the common good or what it takes to achieve it.
The information is here.
The Surprising Power of Questions
Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John
Harvard Business Review
May-June 2018 Issue
Here are two excerpts:
Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.
The New Socratic Method
The first step in becoming a better questioner is simply to ask more questions. Of course, the sheer number of questions is not the only factor that influences the quality of a conversation: The type, tone, sequence, and framing also matter.
(cut)
Not all questions are created equal. Alison’s research, using human coding and machine learning, revealed four types of questions: introductory questions (“How are you?”), mirror questions (“I’m fine. How are you?”), full-switch questions (ones that change the topic entirely), and follow-up questions (ones that solicit more information). Although each type is abundant in natural conversation, follow-up questions seem to have special power. They signal to your conversation partner that you are listening, care, and want to know more. People interacting with a partner who asks lots of follow-up questions tend to feel respected and heard.
An unexpected benefit of follow-up questions is that they don’t require much thought or preparation—indeed, they seem to come naturally to interlocutors. In Alison’s studies, the people who were told to ask more questions used more follow-up questions than any other type without being instructed to do so.
The article is here.
This article clearly relates to psychotherapy communication.
Harvard Business Review
May-June 2018 Issue
Here are two excerpts:
Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.
The New Socratic Method
The first step in becoming a better questioner is simply to ask more questions. Of course, the sheer number of questions is not the only factor that influences the quality of a conversation: The type, tone, sequence, and framing also matter.
(cut)
Not all questions are created equal. Alison’s research, using human coding and machine learning, revealed four types of questions: introductory questions (“How are you?”), mirror questions (“I’m fine. How are you?”), full-switch questions (ones that change the topic entirely), and follow-up questions (ones that solicit more information). Although each type is abundant in natural conversation, follow-up questions seem to have special power. They signal to your conversation partner that you are listening, care, and want to know more. People interacting with a partner who asks lots of follow-up questions tend to feel respected and heard.
An unexpected benefit of follow-up questions is that they don’t require much thought or preparation—indeed, they seem to come naturally to interlocutors. In Alison’s studies, the people who were told to ask more questions used more follow-up questions than any other type without being instructed to do so.
The article is here.
This article clearly relates to psychotherapy communication.
Thursday, June 28, 2018
Making better decisions in groups
The Royal Society
Originally published May 24, 2018
The animation and briefing on making better decisions in groups is based on the research work of Dr Dan Bang and Professor Chris Frith FRS.
It introduces the key concepts around improving decision making in groups with the aim of alerting Royal Society committee chairs and panel members to consider that by pooling diverse information and different areas of expertise, groups can make better decisions than individuals.
Originally published May 24, 2018
The animation and briefing on making better decisions in groups is based on the research work of Dr Dan Bang and Professor Chris Frith FRS.
It introduces the key concepts around improving decision making in groups with the aim of alerting Royal Society committee chairs and panel members to consider that by pooling diverse information and different areas of expertise, groups can make better decisions than individuals.
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