This is a departure from what I've been writing about so far, but something that I've been looking into recently and that seems to make a lot of sense to me in terms of how our brains evolved and how modern life has subverted that evolution.
I stumbled across a video on YouTube about porn addiction, and I must admit my first thought was "Porn is fine, masturbation is natural, this is just prudery". It turns out though, maybe not. I'm not going to go deep (sorry) into this particular topic right now as it certainly merits a post, if not many posts, of its own. If you are interested a good starting point is yourbrainonporn.com .
The basic thrust (sorry, I'll stop now) of the argument is that we evolved in an environment of scarcity. If you saw food, especially energy-rich food like fruit, best to eat it. If you had a chance for sex, best to take it. That's how you passed your genes on. Our brains evolved to reward these behaviours with the associated endorphin rush.
Now though, we are not in an environment of scarcity. That sugar-rich food isn't halfway across a forest, it's in the shop down the road, or your fridge. You don't have to find a sexual partner from another tribe [1] , in fact you don't have to find a sexual partner at all. A few clicks on your laptop and even though you're not actually having sex, you "win" the same endorphin rush at the end.
And so we come to fairly standard addiction theory, where each rush isn't quite as good as the last and you have to find more, different, better ways to scratch the itch. It's all about the dopamine receptors, look it up if you're interested.
This can manifest itself in more subtle ways too. Let's have a look at three areas. Firstly, sport. Sport has in some ways replaced the things we used to do to survive, like hunting and fighting. Sports like football have a clear relationship to the hunt, where team mates communicate, organise themselves spatially and physically exert themselves for a common goal. Target sports like golf directly mimic throwing your spear or shooting your arrow at the prey, giving that "rush" when you nail it between the eyes, or next to the pin.
The problem is, playing sport is quite hard. You have to be fit, you have to practice the technique, you have to find a team, be picked, fit in. A bit less so in individual sports but you still have to make the effort. How much easier is it now to put on your replica shirt and turn on the TV. Cheer the goals and call the phonein to say how great "we" were or how the referee robbed "us". But while you share in the rush, you're not reaping any of the actual benefits of *playing* sport. You're not any fitter, you haven't improved your people skills by working as a team, you don't have the satisfaction of working towards a goal and achieving it.
I realised some time ago that I had a real problem with this, and you may have noticed now that I don't tweet much about QPR. In fact I generally try to find something else to do during games, something better than pressing F5 every minute to see if I win the good hit or the bad hit. In my twenties I used to go and watch a lot, which at least involving getting off my arse and into the fresh air, but it was an expression of a frustrated desire to actually play myself. You can see now, if you like, how the most "passionate" fans are often in awful physical condition.
Another area I'm very familiar with is poker. This one is something of a double edged sword though. Online poker probably did destroy my ability to play live poker. Once I was used to 6 tables at once online, live poker seemed interminably slow. But...online poker was much more profitable and live poker was always annoying to some degree simply because every table of 9 would generally have at least two complete arseholes whose only goal was to irritate people while losing as slowly as possible. Online poker gave me a career, my independence and a great deal to be satisfied about how I applied myself to it...but at one point it certainly had many hallmarks of addiction. In the end I tired of it, and to be honest I wasn't really winning much if at all towards the end. All the same, I do miss that high of winning a tournament! Now I'm more involved in sports betting I try to sweat the games at an absolute minimum - that up-down pleasure-pain reaction to every result or even every shot isn't good for you or your betting.
The last one I'm going to touch on today is interacting with people online. It is better than nothing, but it's really not as good as going out there and being face to face. In many ways it's a lot easier on the Internet, especially if you're arguing with someone. It's easier to be rude, it's easier to change the subject, if you're put on the spot it's easier to google up a link and say "what about this" than it is to actually respond to a point in real time. The same can be said of making fun of people on TV, or a good old Internet pile-on. There's also no possibility of being thumped in the face, as Richard Spencer found out yesterday. It's easy to have those "hits" without the effort of thinking about it, or reading the other person's cues, or even trying to understand what they're saying at all.
The common theme is that taking easy dopamine hits is great in the now...but not so good for you medium and long term. Taking that easy hit means you don't achieve any of the ancillary benefits of "working* for it. Get out there and do it for real. I'm going to try, and if you do go off and look at the research on porn, I'm trying out a "reboot" for myself!
[1] Not your own tribe because incest generally doesn't turn out well over generations.
Saturday 21 January 2017
Tuesday 3 January 2017
The Scientific Method
I wanted to talk a little bit about the scientific method, as I touched on it in both the previous posts. There is a common misunderstanding (wilful or otherwise) that science lurches back and forward from one position to another - and thus you don't have to believe what it's saying right now, if you don't want to. Now it's true that science is always evolving, that it isn't dogmatic and that it's always questioned and tested. This is of course a GOOD THING (How to be Topp capitals). But science generally builds on what has gone before, it doesn't tear it down. As Newton said "I can only see so far because I stand on the shoulders of giants".
Here's an example from my first piece about Impossible Expectations, a quote from Trump transition team member Anthony Scaramucci
"There was an overwhelming science that the Earth was flat. And there was an overwhelming science that [...] we were the center of the world. A hundred percent, you know, we get a lot of things wrong in the scientific community. You and I both know that."
Taking his first example, no, there was not "an overwhelming science" that the Earth was flat. It was what people believed. We like to think we're much cleverer than primitive societies, but as Newton said again, that's only because we stand on the shoulders of giants. If no one had ever told us, most of us would instinctively believe that the Earth was flat. It looks flat. A few might wonder about how ships drop below the horizon but that's about it.
People believed the Earth was flat *until* a very clever man called Eratosthenes applied the scientific method. He devised and conducted an experiment [1] that would have one result if the Earth was flat, and another if it was a sphere. He performed it and not only demonstrated that the Earth was a sphere [2], he estimated its diameter with remarkable accuracy. Prior to that there was no "scientific position", because no one had done any science to try to find out.
Similarly, people believed that the Sun rotated around the Earth for a long time because it wasn't possible to perform an experiment to test it. Even when Copernicus came up with his heliocentric theory, while it clearly fitted observation in a much simpler way (no need to screw around with epicycles), it wasn't possible to test it until telescopes improved and people like Brahe and Kepler could make the necessary measurements. Once the scientific method of theory, prediction and experiment was able to take effect, it solved the problem.
For a final example, going back to Newton, while Newtonian physics was overtaken by Einstein, it's important to stress that Newton wasn't *wrong*. His theories of motion were perfectly consistent with what he could observe at the time, and they work perfectly well until you approach the very small (subatomic scale), very large (galactic scale) and/or very fast (the speed of light). If an Einstein had come up with his theories in the 18th century, there would have been no way to test them. By the latter 20th century though, we could do things like fly atomic clocks around on planes and see gravitational lensing in action to test and verify his theoretical work [3] [4]
So while there are occasions where accepted science is wrong, they're quite rare and you have to do better than "science once thought the Earth was flat". People thought the Earth was flat. Some still do, although most modern "Flat Earth” types just enjoy arguing about it because they have nothing better to do. A better example might be Lysenko's work in the Soviet Union, which certainly wasn't accepted worldwide and had a large element of ideology thrown in.
One reason for the popular conception that science “keeps changing its mind” is the way tabloids, particularly the Mail and Express which are notorious for this, like to pick up and sensationalise individual studies (rather than the scientific consensus). Every now and then a study “reveals” that chocolate cures cancer, or causes cancer. Why oh why can't these scientists make their minds up? Because you're cherry-picking individual studies that are, by and large, not confirmed by the scientific method of peer-review, repeatability and use of proper sample sizes. Unfortunately, by the time this is disconfirmed, the papers have moved on to the next half-arsed study about how drinking wine prevents Alzheimers, or causes it. All fun and games until you have a situation like the Wakefield paper on vaccines and autism which has caused untold damage despite having been quickly and fully refuted by the scientific community.
Sooo, in conclusion, science does not have to be taken as gospel. It can, and indeed should, be subject to constant testing, review and improvement. However, the science we have at the moment is the result of huge amounts of continuous research by smart, qualified people. Experts. If you do want to contradict them, the onus is on you. The burden of proof is on you, and you have to do a lot better than just saying “nuh-uh”. I'll expand on this in the next post about Arguments From Authority.
[1] It really is very clever, I recommend looking it up.
[2] Yes alright, an oblate spheroid. Close enough for someone in the 3rd century BC.
[3] And indeed the recent discovery of gravitational waves is another vindication of an Einsteinian prediction.
[4] Another one is that Satnavs wouldn't work if they didn't correct for relativistic effects of time, inasmuch as they work anyway, mine keeps sending me down dead ends :(.
Here's an example from my first piece about Impossible Expectations, a quote from Trump transition team member Anthony Scaramucci
"There was an overwhelming science that the Earth was flat. And there was an overwhelming science that [...] we were the center of the world. A hundred percent, you know, we get a lot of things wrong in the scientific community. You and I both know that."
Taking his first example, no, there was not "an overwhelming science" that the Earth was flat. It was what people believed. We like to think we're much cleverer than primitive societies, but as Newton said again, that's only because we stand on the shoulders of giants. If no one had ever told us, most of us would instinctively believe that the Earth was flat. It looks flat. A few might wonder about how ships drop below the horizon but that's about it.
People believed the Earth was flat *until* a very clever man called Eratosthenes applied the scientific method. He devised and conducted an experiment [1] that would have one result if the Earth was flat, and another if it was a sphere. He performed it and not only demonstrated that the Earth was a sphere [2], he estimated its diameter with remarkable accuracy. Prior to that there was no "scientific position", because no one had done any science to try to find out.
Similarly, people believed that the Sun rotated around the Earth for a long time because it wasn't possible to perform an experiment to test it. Even when Copernicus came up with his heliocentric theory, while it clearly fitted observation in a much simpler way (no need to screw around with epicycles), it wasn't possible to test it until telescopes improved and people like Brahe and Kepler could make the necessary measurements. Once the scientific method of theory, prediction and experiment was able to take effect, it solved the problem.
For a final example, going back to Newton, while Newtonian physics was overtaken by Einstein, it's important to stress that Newton wasn't *wrong*. His theories of motion were perfectly consistent with what he could observe at the time, and they work perfectly well until you approach the very small (subatomic scale), very large (galactic scale) and/or very fast (the speed of light). If an Einstein had come up with his theories in the 18th century, there would have been no way to test them. By the latter 20th century though, we could do things like fly atomic clocks around on planes and see gravitational lensing in action to test and verify his theoretical work [3] [4]
So while there are occasions where accepted science is wrong, they're quite rare and you have to do better than "science once thought the Earth was flat". People thought the Earth was flat. Some still do, although most modern "Flat Earth” types just enjoy arguing about it because they have nothing better to do. A better example might be Lysenko's work in the Soviet Union, which certainly wasn't accepted worldwide and had a large element of ideology thrown in.
One reason for the popular conception that science “keeps changing its mind” is the way tabloids, particularly the Mail and Express which are notorious for this, like to pick up and sensationalise individual studies (rather than the scientific consensus). Every now and then a study “reveals” that chocolate cures cancer, or causes cancer. Why oh why can't these scientists make their minds up? Because you're cherry-picking individual studies that are, by and large, not confirmed by the scientific method of peer-review, repeatability and use of proper sample sizes. Unfortunately, by the time this is disconfirmed, the papers have moved on to the next half-arsed study about how drinking wine prevents Alzheimers, or causes it. All fun and games until you have a situation like the Wakefield paper on vaccines and autism which has caused untold damage despite having been quickly and fully refuted by the scientific community.
Sooo, in conclusion, science does not have to be taken as gospel. It can, and indeed should, be subject to constant testing, review and improvement. However, the science we have at the moment is the result of huge amounts of continuous research by smart, qualified people. Experts. If you do want to contradict them, the onus is on you. The burden of proof is on you, and you have to do a lot better than just saying “nuh-uh”. I'll expand on this in the next post about Arguments From Authority.
[1] It really is very clever, I recommend looking it up.
[2] Yes alright, an oblate spheroid. Close enough for someone in the 3rd century BC.
[3] And indeed the recent discovery of gravitational waves is another vindication of an Einsteinian prediction.
[4] Another one is that Satnavs wouldn't work if they didn't correct for relativistic effects of time, inasmuch as they work anyway, mine keeps sending me down dead ends :(.
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