Dream Fragments

I'm driving down a gravel road on a classic red motorcycle with sidecar*1.  A child, perhaps 4 or 5, with his shorts slipping down a little to show some plumber's crevice, stands facing away from us.  Whitney Houston (early, still with the curls and no cocaine), who is in the sidecar shoots the kid in the bum with a watergun as we drive by him.  She lets loose peals of laughter.

I am part of a group from the Department of Health and Human Services doing a routine inspection of a foster mother's house.  She is a jolly lady, one of those older ladies who loves cats just a bit more than is ordinary, and she is just fine with the whole situation.  There are no children in the house, which is an older and once grand house of several stories, but as I move through the house I see a series of cats.  The first are two miniature leopards together in a cage.  I think, "At least they aren't full size leopards" only to see a full size leopard in the next, larger cage.  Lying around the place are domestic cats of varying degrees of grace or indolence.  Many are quite large.

However, I am here to do an inspection.  The place is one of those houses that was once shabby, and has gone with that for twenty years.  It is grimy, messy, and has lots of old fabrics covering things and hanging "decoratively," but there is no smell *2.  I search around and find a used Q-tip, unfortunately broken off and barely an inch long.  Armed with this Q-tip I set off into the house to take forensic swabs to be examined at the lab to make sure the house is not contaminated.  Holding the Q-tip very delicately between thumb and forefinger I reach into the corner of cabinets and such to gently swab the surfaces, one of which is essentially an ash tray.  Since I only have the one Q-tip I must make sure that I get the four samples I need by rotating the Q-tip 90 degrees each time.

*1  I have had quite a few dreams over the years of owning and riding motorcycles.  These have been some of my most vivid dreams, to the point where when I awake I think I own a motorcycle and can ride one.  I have never been on a motorcycle and am not going to own one because I think I would have so much fun that I would wrap myself around a tree within the first week.

*2  I have no sense of smell in my dreams, sometimes I just know that something does smell, as if I had read it in a book or someone had told me.  In fact, the only sense I actually have direct experience with in dreams is the sense of sight (I dream in life-like colour) but I know that other senses are going on.  For example, I don't actually hear anybody say things to me in dreams, I just know that they have told me things.

Most Good Per Dollar

One of the most effective ways of increasing your happiness right now is by giving something to someone.  getting things for yourself, once your basic needs have been met (and you are reading this on a computer), doesn't do much for your happiness.

From this talk it turns out that you don't even need to know the person to whom you are giving things.  However, we still like money and it's hard for most people to give lots of it away.  As a result I decided to look and see if I could find the charity that does the most good per dollar.  Through some rather intensive research (I am often amazed at what people don't search for on the internet) the charity that seems to do the most good per dollar is Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI).  For 50 cents an individual can be treated for Schistosomiasis for a year AND help fund research into preventing/eliminating this disease.


This is what Schistomiasis does to people.  You get it by drinking contaminated water.


Above all, schistosomiasis is a chronic disease. Many infections are subclinically symptomatic, with mild anemia and malnutrition being common in endemic areas. Acute schistosomiasis (Katayama's fever) may occur weeks after the initial infection, especially by S. mansoni and S. japonicum. Manifestations include:

• Abdominal pain
• Cough
• Diarrhea
• Eosinophilia — extremely high eosinophil granulocyte (white blood cell) count.
• Fever
• Fatigue
• Hepatosplenomegaly — the enlargement of both the liver and the spleen. Hepatic schistosomiasis is the second most common cause of esophageal varices^[3] worldwide.
• Genital sores — lesions that increase vulnerability to HIV infection. Lesions caused by schistosomiasis may continue to be a problem after control of the schistosomiasis infection itself. Early treatment, especially of children, which is relatively inexpensive, prevents formation of the sores.^[4][5]
• Skin symptoms: At the start of infection, mild itching and a papular dermatitis of the feet and other parts after swimming in polluted streams containing cercariae.^[6]:432

Occasionally central nervous system lesions occur: cerebral granulomatous disease may be caused by ectopic S. japonicum eggs in the brain, and granulomatous lesions around ectopic eggs in the spinal cord from S. mansoni and S. haematobium infections may result in a transverse myelitis with flaccid paraplegia.

Calcification of the bladder wall on a plain x-ray image of the pelvis, in a sub-Saharan man of 44 years old. This is due to urinary schistosomiasis.

Continuing infection may cause granulomatous reactions and fibrosis in the affected organs, which may result in manifestations that include:

• Colonic polyposis with bloody diarrhea (Schistosoma mansoni mostly);
• Portal hypertension with hematemesis and splenomegaly (S. mansoni, S. japonicum);
• Cystitis and ureteritis (S. haematobium) with hematuria, which can progress to bladder cancer;
• Pulmonary hypertension (S. mansoni, S. japonicum, more rarely S. haematobium);
• Glomerulonephritis; and central nervous system lesions.

Bladder cancer diagnosis and mortality are generally elevated in affected areas.

All of these symptoms reduce or prevent the ability of people to work, farm, start new businesses, take care of their children, generally contribute to society.  In fact, such symptoms retard the development of poor places.  Treatment of this disease makes people healthier, wealthier, reduces population growth and so helps to move people from the deepest poverty to better conditions.

The Federal minimum wage in the USA is $7.25.  That will prevent the above symptoms in 14 people for a year.  In an hour you can transform the lives of 14 people.  I don't want you to think about the misery of those 14 people, I want you to imagine 14 smiling faces, walking, talking, loving, working because of you.

Give a little, I guarantee that it will make you happy today.

Non Zero Sum Games

Human beings tend to think in terms of zero sum games.  Basically this means the idea that in any enterprise the amount of stuff available is a fixed amount and so if one person gets more, another person must get less.  There's a cake that needs dividing.  If Billy eats half of it then Alfred and Maria have to share the other half between the two of them.

Human beings also tend to think of things as static, unchanging.  How many times do you hear things like, "If we keep using oil at our present rate" or "If the population keeps rising at this rate."  Today I read that "Mankind hasn't grown any more humane in these last 67 years.  We are what we are."  This is simply the latest battle between Dade and I over the correct view of the world.  His side proclaims a fatalistic, pessimistic side the world - an unchanging human nature, a tottering civilization, a pervasive decline.  My side proclaims an open-futured, optimistic, changing past and future, a robust civilization and a pervasive, dramatic improvement.  I am, of course, right.

This leads to people who want to "Get theirs" rather than "Give handouts."  It leads to a tax debate where one side wants to cut government spending because of government debt, and another side wants to tax the rich to reduce debt and still keep government spending where it is.  It leads to some people wanting to dramatically reduce the amount of material things we use and where we get them in order to save the environment and another group wanting to use up the resources to maintain the economy.  It leads to the idea that some people only think about their own happiness and therefore cause misery elsewhere.

However, the Earth is a zero sum game in only one capacity, there's only a certain amount of material things on Earth.  It isn't even a zero sum game in terms of resources.  Vast amounts of energy are pumped into the system, for free, every single day, everywhere in the world, every day, because the sun shines.  In the beginning there was no life, and life has spread to almost everywhere on Earth, fed by the sun.  How does oil work?  It combines carbon and oxygen in an exothermic reaction.  Do that a lot and you run out of oil.  However, there's still exactly the same amount of carbon and oxygen.  Break down that carbon-oxygen bond using the sun and you have the useful part of oil again.  Populations do not rise at the same rate.  This is the most peaceful time in history, both in terms of war and crime.  Most humans have a concept of human rights (a relatively recent phenomenon) racism is down, acceptance of homosexuality is up, etc..  I bet you think that there are fewer large mammals, and fewer large mammal predators than there has ever been.  Actually this is the period with the greatest number of large mammals, they just tend to be cows, pigs and sheep.  There are over 6 billion predators on the planet called humans.

The Earth, our experience, our numbers, our food, our resources are not zero sum games.  Almost nothing is static, from the very composition and distribution of what makes up the world, to the morality of people.  If you taxed the rich at 90% and distributed wealth more equally through the government you get the failed attempts at communism.  If you have no taxes, and therefore no government, you get anarchy.  Tax at a rate that encourages people to try to get rich and still provides a government with enough to pay for research, education, and infrastructure and you get a growing economy with a stable population that gets richer.  Starting from the same amount of resources, through time, you can increase or decrease resources (and crime, and health, and beauty, etc.)

Why do people think in terms of static, zero sum games?  It is because for most of the history of homo sapiens things didn't change, populations remained steady, most people would go through a life without seeing a single innovation.  Hunter-gathers using essentially the same simple stone and wood tools lived for about 90% of modern human history.  Short lives, infant mortality, disease, violence all kept population essentially steady.  The same way of life in the same ecological conditions with the same number of people over tens of thousands of years will result in the default attitude that there is just a certain amount of stuff and things don't change.

I am a great believer in non zero sum games.  I think an investment in education increases the amount of resources, lowers crime (among other factors).  I think tiny investments in child health reduces population growth.  I think relatively small investment in research, combined with education results in vastly increased resources.  I think governments that cooperate produce a bigger cake, a more optimistic population, and can spend more money on non zero sum games like education, research and health.  People think the most important people in history are those who start or end wars, or make political alliances, or inspire people.  the most important people in history are technological innovators.  The two world wars resulted in a combined 75 million deaths.  In 1950 smallpox killed an estimated 50 million a year.  All of us know the names Hitler, Stalin, Churchill.  Do you know who invented the smallpox vaccine?  I didn't (apparently it was Edward Jenner).

All of the above is essentially a case for the instinctive fallacy of there being only so much stuff, and things not changing.  It is a case for the power and utility of non-zero sum games.  It is a case for investment and cooperation, things that require investment of will and resources for greater pay-offs in the future.

I want to end this with a practical use of a non-zero sum game that requires little investment and potentially great rewards.  Research has shown that happiness is contagious.  Being happy makes those you know more happy, but moreover makes the people they know more happy.  An increase in happiness by one person increases the chance of the people you directly know by 15% (if you know five people that's a 46% chance that you will take some from not happy to happy) and the people they know by 10% (if they know five people that's an 87% chance that one person will be happy) and of course such a process spreads from anyone who becomes happy.  if you become happy and know some people well it is almost certain that other people will be happy.  The only way this process stops is if no-one in a circle knows anybody outside of that circle, or if the small odds against someone in that group becoming happy occurs.

How can you try to be happy?  The answers are throughout this blog but they really come down to being optimistic, seeing the good in people, being aware of your environment, taking the time to slow down sometimes, giving yourself and your things to other people.  In my mind you have a responsibility towards your friends and loved ones to try to be as happy as possible, and it is wonderful for you too.

Contempt

Contempt is viewing something or someone with the disgust  towards something lesser.  Stupidity, laziness, ignorance, etc. can all inspire contempt as long as you feel you are less stupid, less lazy, less ignorant.  Contempt is easy.  You don't need to work at contempt. If I ask you to think of someone that you hold in contempt I think it almost certain that you can do so almost immediately.  It may be that you have decided that holding people in contempt is simply wrong, I have certainly heard people say that they don't hate anybody (which is close but not quite the same).

There is something about contempt that makes us feel justified about it.  The usual stories we tell ourselves in which we are a noble hero apply, but there's a particular feedback loop that happens with contempt.  We have contempt for those who are substantially below us in the areas that we consider worthy.  We judge ourselves on those factors in comparison to others.  Being around those we find contemptible indicates to us that we are better, which deepens the contempt.  Such a feedback loop can result in the automatic dismissal of anything that person does because they are stupid and don't know what they are talking about.  We find ways to confirm our contempt and ignore the rest.

What does contempt do for us?  Contempt is a negative sensation, based on disgust, disapproval.  Negative thinking is bad for our health and how we feel.  Holding people in contempt is bad for you and makes you feel less happy.  It also is bad for the ability to get things done.  Research shows that the most effective groups say more positive things towards each other, at work the best performing groups had a ration of 5:1 positive statements (good idea, well done, thank you for getting that done, I'm confident that we can get this done, we are a team, I'm proud of us) to negative statements.  Interestingly enough this is also the ratio for the healthiest marriages.  We would be able to get more things done and be happier people if we removed contempt from our lives.

If contempt is bad for us and our groups why does it even exist?  Contempt enforces conformity.  One of the most powerful forms of behavior modification is shame.  Contempt is the expression, or the source of the expression, that a person should feel shame.  In small groups contempt enables extreme social punishment, punishment even to the point of damaging those who hold others in contempt.  Such punishment is a mathematically effective strategy in maximizing individual resources in situations with fixed resources.  In a small tribe where the men are expected to out on a regular basis and hunt, bringing back the kill to share among the tribe, someone who either sponges off the other hunters or doesn't bring back the meat has a short term advantage in terms of resources.  If the community holds such people in contempt it enables the community to withhold resources, shun the person, essentially cut them off from the community.  The community exchanges the loss of resources from hunting, increased suspicion, and lower performance in general for a decreased chance of sponging.

The thing is that in modern societies groups are much larger, large enough to have interacting sub groups.  You may have a work group, a church group, a social group, a group of neighbors.  Each of these groups can provide validation for you as a person, provide you with a sense of worth, provide a reason to reject the sense of shame.  We also have far more opportunities to change groups.  If you are held in contempt by your church, you can go to a different church.  We also have a relatively new sense that freedom matters.  We can tell ourselves that behaving how we want, even when society disapproves of your particular behavior, is a positive thing within the overall society because you are exercising your right to freedom.  Finally we have information about large groups of people with whom we may have almost no interactions.  I will probably never meet a member of a religion that requires women to have a subservient role but I am quite capable of having contempt for every single person in that religion (including the women).

The modern world removes the vast majority of the utility of contempt.  It makes you less healthy, it makes you more stressed, it makes your community less able to get things done.  Just look at the efficiency of Congress now after years and years of negativity towards the opposite group.  It can't get anything done and it has whipped up adequate fervor among the populace that it maybe that two thirds of the populous can find a different third contemptible.  If each side of the aisle took more time complimenting the other and expressing confidence that together they could accomplish great things the whole thing might actually work.

I take less than a half gram of a substance each day.  It has transformed my brain in a serious way, not through any force of my character, not through any positive qualities that I might have.  The problem with my brain was not through any lack of character, and lack of intelligence, any cowardice.  My brain didn't have the right ratio of things to work well.  I am smarter than most people, but not through anything I did.  I am lazier than most people, but not because I want to be lazy, or that I am unwilling to do useful things, it's just that I don't care about a lot of things.  I don't think not caring about some things was a conscious decision in many cases.  It has been shown that people tend to be born liberal or conservative rather than made that way.  A belief in a rational scientific outlook, or a particular religious, mystical outlook is largely a consequence of the culture in which you were raised.  My point is that the qualities that make up what we find contemptible are most probably things that happened to them rather than things that they (and we) decided to have.

It is easy to conjure contempt, it is natural.  In the modern world it is mostly counter-productive.  Do you want to have less contempt?  If so I recommend these steps.  Consciously try to identify positive and negative thoughts and statements that you make.  Try to increase the positive thoughts not through a program but just trying to remember to keep this in your mind.  Tell yourself that you are a better person when you are positive.  Try to look for the positive in people, even if they are stupid, cruel bastards, and tell them that you appreciate those positive qualities.  Remember that people have their own stories in which they and we) are the heroes.  Try to understand those stories.

5:1 good to bad statements.  Think of three good things a day.  It's not the pig's fault it can't fly.

This Worth Thing

I have been reading the massive literary undertaking that is the Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson.  It is a massive (literally) undertaking in scope.  There are a couple of problems with the work, one being the execrable poetry that starts each chapter (I just skip it at this point), the other being the tendency for characters to spend a large amount of time philosophizing.

Now, for anyone who reads this blog there can be no doubt that I spend a fair amount of my time philosophizing.  This blog essentially has a philosophy.  I'm not against philosophizing, I can often enjoy it, but I'm not a huge fan of philosophy expressed by the majority of characters in a fantasy novel.

The good thing about this aspect of the book is that the different characters have somewhat different philosophies.  Erikson doesn't just just use repeated characters to spout the same ideas and beliefs.  However, there is a definite core to the whole thing.  On one side is the dark idea of humans never learning, repeating the folly of destroying each other and the environment around them.  The idea that everything is temporary, doomed to destruction, and the essential path of the world is a slow but inevitable spiral downwards.  The other side is that life is essentially ridiculous and so you should laugh at it, enjoy the little things, and concentrate on your relationships with others.

For me the most important philosophical moment in the book is when a character asks, "What about this worth thing?"  I think that's a very insightful question.

By far the most common use of the word, "worth" is of monetary value.  What is something worth?  It is worth what someone will pay for it, an exchange of something for anything that is considered to be an advantage.  We all know that people will pay different amount for different things.  The monetary value, what you will exchange for something, is subjective.  What it really comes down to is how you feel about an exchange.

The next most common use is the question, "Is it worth it?" with regard to doing something.  You might ask if it is worth going to college, or going to a concert, digging up the garden and planting vegetables.  This again is an exchange, time and effort for a result.

The final use of worth that I will discuss is the idea that a person has qualities that are highly esteemed.  It seems patently clear that this is the area that the question is addressing.  I can feel that someone is worthy of my love, my time, my admiration.  What does this mean?  It means that the person provides enough of something for us to provide something.  This concept of the worth of a person is most prevalent within cultures.  Martin Luther King is worth a day of commemoration in the United States, to remember his legacy, his sacrifice, how far we have come and how far we have to go.  In the United States no-one at all would think I am worthy of a national day of commemoration.  Society en masse can decide the worth of a person.

The thing is, different cultures and societies can value entirely different things.  A soldier who is killed in a conflict is often considered to have given his life to preserve the freedoms we enjoy.  He is considered to be of the highest worth by many.  Other people may consider the soldier a mindless automaton, willing to travel to foreign countries to kill innocent people for the benefit of corporations.  The same behavior, different concepts of worth.  A religious leader who exhorts his followers to live a certain life, and despise a different life can be viewed as a great man by his followers, and be thought of as less than useless by those who disagree with his position.  A person can dedicate their life to achieving personal bliss and serenity, sitting on a mountain top being fed by the local community.  He can be thought worthy of the title of saint, or he can be thought of as a selfish sponger, living off the goodwill of fools when he should be doing something useful.  Those in the USA and those in Bhutan have a very different idea of a worthy life.

Society can put a value on someone, what they are worth, but so can individual people, and most significantly with regard to themselves.  A person can think themselves worthy of respect and love, or worth nothing.  Such a view of oneself can be the most important concept in a life, in fact the difference between life and death.

We have seen that this "worth thing" is an evaluation of people, but an evaluation based on what?  We value the worth of an object by what other objects we are willing to exchange for it (money is an agreed representation of objects).  We value the worth of an activity by how much time, energy (and potential objects) we are willing to put forth for the results of that activity.  Work is a voluntary exchange of time and effort for future opportunities for stuff and activities.  The worth of a person is the value that they bring to a society.  Martin Luther King is worth something for changing our ideas of race, making society a better place. 

How we decide the worth of a person largely depends on the culture in which we grew up.  For most of us the concept of worth is pre-programed into our minds.  In a culture based on fairness, hard-work, and materialism a man who sits in a field trying to be as happy as possible is a bum.  In a Buddhist monastery the man teaching the seven secrets of success is wasting his life and ruining others by preaching that success and money makes the world a better place.  For Buddhists a person trying the best they can to be as happy as possible increases the amount of happiness in a society.  In materialistic USA a hard-working person with ambition and drive, who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, adds value to society by creating jobs, putting more money into the economy, being an example, not being a drain on society.

My mother said to me, "Don't care what anybody else thinks" about the experience of being a man staying at home doing chores in Texas.  Local society doesn't think much of such people, they feel I don't have much worth.  Caring about what other people think doesn't help me under such circumstances.  It engenders low self-esteem, guilt, and therefore makes me less happy.  I don't judge the worth of someone by how hard they work or what trials they have have endured.  Why do I care about the opinions of others?  I care because we are social creatures.  There are almost no people who simply don't care about the views of others.

"What about this worth thing?"  This is one of the very few posts in which I don't have an answer that simplifies and explains.  This worth thing is complex.  It intertwines individual and culture, values and freedom.  It is an invention of the human mind, like rights, justice, patriotism.  It can change over time, place and situation.  I don't think I can say more than this worth thing is worth thinking about, evaluating, measuring ourselves again.  It may be that the answer to those thoughts is that the concept of worth doesn't really matter, or that it does more harm than good, or it is the root upon which our whole lives are based.

In my opinion it is worth trying to be happy, both for yourself and for the wider community.  I think that thinking about the worth of others, even the worth of yourself doesn't help much in being happy.