Multidisplinary Thoughts

Weekly Read Compilation December 15, 2013
W!!K!Y B!^D COM!!!^1!O^

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking

Compilation of curated interestingness !om various disciplines
covering articles, essays, interviews, books,videos etc
Read it on : www.capitalideasonline.com

1 Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking
How different would the world be if we paid the True Cost of
food and farming?
Published on December 10, 2013, by Rob Hopkins, transitionnetwork.org

Following Patrick Holden was a video message of support from Prince
Charles, who had visited a workshop the day before but who was unable to
be present at the Friday conference.
The Prince spoke of the impossibility of feeding the world on the back of
weakening ecosystems. He argued that the crucial missing piece in todays
food industry is that the polluter is not held financially accountable, and
that this needs to change. The Prince called for more research into finding
ways of making ecological farming more profitable, and he ended on a
note of cheerful optimism, saying that we do have the capacity to turn the
current tide.
We then launched into the first session of the morning entitled Current
Food Systems The Hidden Costs. Professor Jules Pretty of Essex
University, kicked off with his keynote address, The Need for Change. He
discussed the growing awareness of the impact of farming externalities
over the years since the so-called green revolution of the 50s and 60s.
This led to the study conducted by Pretty and others in 1998 that
attempted to calculate the cost of these externalities in the UK, (including
wildlife damage, soil erosion, food poisoning etc) and the figure they
arrived at was 2.4 billion per year an amount that was in fact higher than
the net income from farming at the time.
Pretty also acknowledged that this figure didnt reflect the full extent of
farming externalities it didnt for example, include the costs of pesticide-
induced harm to human health, which would no doubt have added to the
total quite considerably. It was nevertheless an important step towards
assessing the true cost of food production, and Tim Langs study in 2005
built upon this, coining the term food miles and exploring the costs of
food transportation. The thrust of Prettys argument was that we need to
increase yields in sustainable and small-scale agriculture. In doing so, we
would protect our natural capital whilst ensuring the worlds population is
well fed.
We often hear that we already produce enough to feed the entire world
population, but the point illustrated by Prettys work on externalities, is that
much of that food is produced in a way that is costly and harmful to
ecosystems and human health. The focus, then, needs to be on increasing
the yields of sustainable growing methods whether through habitat
design, agroforestry, mixed cropping techniques and others to ensure not
only that the environment is cared for, but also that people are eating
nutritious, health-supporting foods.
Following Prettys keynote address were a series of short presentations by
five other speakers. Professor Whendee Silver of the University of
California at Berkeley, discussed the importance of locking carbon into the
soil and asked whether agricultural practices can help to manage the
carbon cycle so as to be part of the solution to rising CO2 levels. She
argued that preserving grasslands, as carbon rich eco systems that cover
30% of the globes landmass, could be a way of off-setting the carbon we
release into the atmosphere.
During the questions session later on, Silver also emphasised the power of
word of mouth, saying that everyone at the conference was a
communicator and we all have a responsibility to share stories and ideas
gleaned from this conference to inspire curiosity and provoke debate.
Professor Tim Lang, of City University, followed with his discussion linking
food policy and public health. Lang has been looking at the global burden
of disease, focusing specifically on those diseases that are food related. He
has estimated that the global costs of treatment for diabetes are
approximately $1.7 trillion, that cardiovascular disease incurs $15.6 trillion
and that cancer costs $8.3 trillion.
His point then, is that even if our food prices currently dont reflect these
health externalities, we are already paying for them through our taxes and
our health care systems. Lang argues that we need to design our food
system around ecological and public health, and that a dietary shift away
from the over-consumption of meat and towards plant-based diets will
support health and cost us less.
Next up was Peter Blom, Chief Executive of the Triodos Bank. Blom
argued that our environmental, financial and social crises are connected by
the practice of borrowing from the future instead of learning to build on
the past, and that we need to rid ourselves of the illusion that over
indebtedness is acceptable and that money will always be there. He
identified three principles that would ensure environmental, social and
financial success and that can be applied to any sector: transparency,
sustainability and diversity.
Nadia Scialabba, the Senior Environment Officer from the FAO in Rome,
then spoke about her work modelling low impact agriculture, for positive
environmental impact. She discussed how organics currently internalise the
external costs whereas conventional agriculture does not, and how this
skews consumer choice and leaves little financial incentive for a shift to
sustainable farming methods. And, in the current system, food prices have
been so prohibitively high for millions, that it is unrealistic to expect them
to pay the cost of natural resources on top of those prices. A new system
is therefore necessary. Scialabba also emphasised the huge gap between
knowledge and action that numerous case studies exist proving
sustainable methods can produce healthy yields etc, but that action is yet
to follow in any meaningful way.
Lastly, Guillermo Castilieja of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
spoke about his conservation work in the Amazon, the role of funding
organisations, and the need for collective, multi stakeholder action if we
are to effect change in the food system. After a brief (organic, fair-trade)
coffee break, the next session followed under the title of True Cost
Accounting in Practice. This was where the idea of true cost accounting
began to come alive for me, as we dug deeper into the realities of
externality costs as well as the complexity of attributing costs.
Dr Pete Myers, the founder and CEO of the not-for-profit organisation
Environmental Health Sciences, was the first to speak. The focus of his
research is a matter close to my heart, and looks at the human health
consequences of chemical contamination in our environment, particularly
from agricultural pesticides and herbicides. This is an area that highlights
the need for far more research into farming externalities, as Myers pointed
out that only the tiniest amount of chemicals have been subjected to
independent studies and only a fraction of studies currently connect the
cause and effect of widespread chemical usage in our environment. Much
headway has been made in recent years however, particularly in the field of
epigenetics, exploring endocrine disruption as an effect of chemical
exposure and how events in the womb play out over a person or animals
lifetime.
Myers emphasised the point that low doses do matter, citing studies
conducted on mice that show how the most minute traces of hormone
disrupting chemicals can cause obesity. Worryingly, Myers also pointed out
that the tools we currently use to assess what is safe in the chemical world,
are deeply flawed and based on out of date science from the 1950s. I was
thrilled that Myers was included in the line up though as I often feel this is a
crucial, but much neglected and misunderstood area of the debate around
food one that does however, have an important role to play in the true
cost accounting approach.
Nadia Scialabba then spoke once more about her FAO report, published
earlier this year, that looked at the environmental impact of food waste
along food chains across the world. This is the first, large-scale study of its
kind into food waste and its findings are staggering. They calculated, for
example, that the cost of food waste, based on producer prices, is $750
billion USD per year. The full summary of this report can be downloaded
here.
Tristram Stuart, the food waste campaigner and founder of Feeding the 5k,
next spoke on the same topic of food waste and the costs it incurs. He
estimates that a 1/3 of all food produced is wasted, and calculates that if
the land used to grow this food were simply left untouched, we would
sequester 26 billion tons of carbon in its soil. Stuart is particularly keen on
the idea of feeding food waste not fit for human consumption, to pigs.
This is a practice currently banned by the EU, but one that he argues would
be 67% more energy efficient than passing it through anaerobic digesters.
Stuart also pointed out that food companies are so concerned about their
brand image, that forcing them to internalise the cost of waste through a
true cost accounting mechanism would have a dramatic, positive effect on
their practices.
Adrian de Groot Ruiz, Executive Director or the organisation True Price,
then took the stage to discuss the methodology of calculating the true cost
of food products. Together with the SFT, True Price conducted a study on
the price of coffee produced in Brazil, comparing true cost pricing of
conventional and sustainable coffee products. They found that, by
factoring in the cost of all externalities present in the production methods,
a 250g pack of conventionally grown coffee (with a current retail price of
$2) would have the true price of $5.17. By contrast, the true price of a
250g pack of sustainably produced coffee, was found to be $4.58.
De Groot Ruiz added though that as these sustainable methods improve in
efficiency and yield, they estimate that the true price of the same pack of
coffee could be reduced to $3.79 by 2018. This was a fascinating
breakdown of how true cost accounting would work. The gap between
current, cheap retail prices and true prices assigned to the more
sustainable option, remains however. How this can be addressed in the
context of increasing levels of food poverty around the globe, is an issue
that was raised a number of times during the day and is one that clearly
requires much careful research and attention.
Last to speak in this session was Helmy Abouleish, managing director of
SEKEM, an organisation that works for sustainable development,
community building and biodynamic farming in Egypt. I found his story
particularly inspiring and he delivered it with passion and humour.
Abouleish inherited the vision from his father of reclaiming desert soil,
whilst also tackling social and economic challenges faced by Egyptian
society. He quoted Mandela saying that It always seems impossible until it
is done, and despite much scepticism, they have, since 1975, created
communities and lush, productive farms in what was formally a barren
desert. Abouleish explained that their focus on producing rich, nutritious
compost and protecting the living soil, means they use 40% less water than
their neighbours. The scale of their vision and extent of their achievements
is quite staggering do have a look at their website to get a full picture of
the many projects they are engaged in.
By this point, my head was bulging with inspiration, and I spared a thought
for the hard-working graphic designer, busy capturing the days highlights
on a very long piece of paper running alongside the stage. Below is the
first section of her work I am hoping the full piece will be posted on the
SFT website soon. Once this last session ended, off we all went to enjoy a
delicious organic lunch that would sustain us through the afternoon.
The first session after lunch, Ecosystems and Food Systems: Valuing the
Connection, began with a talk by Pavan Sukhdev of the global initiative,
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). Sukhdev, an
environmental economist, has been leading TEEBs work to assess the
value of what they refer to as ecosystem services those mechanisms
within our ecosystems upon which our economies depend. One example
of this would be the crucial role that bees play as pollinators, and as
Sukhdev pointed out, No bee ever sent you an invoice. That was my first
favourite quote of the day. My second came later in his talk when he
described externalities as the biggest free lunch in the history of the
world. He described how, for example, the true costs of cattle ranching in
South America are actually 18 times higher than the apparent costs.
TEEB also works to determine the cost of the loss of biodiversity and of
environmental damage, and their aim is to ensure their findings are
incorporated into decisions made by businesses and governments across
the world. Sukhdev argued that the reason change isnt happening on any
grand scale is simply because the changes needed to protect our
environment and health do not, in our current system, increase profit for
corporations. He also referred to the work of the organisation Trucost, who
are collecting data and attributing cost to the externalities produced by
practices of the top 3000 global companies. In closing Sukhdev was keen
to draw attention to TEEBs recently initiated study on agriculture and
food, a scoping workshop for which will be held in January 2014. See here
for more information.
Following Sukhdevs talk were three brief presentations by leaders in the
field of conservation. Peter Seligmann, Chief Executive of Conservation
International, began by focusing on the role of corporations and their
relationship to conservation work. He was broadly optimistic about the
shifts happening within corporations, which he saw as being driven by
enlightened self-interest and a growing awareness of their own
dependence upon the health of the environment. This elicited some
scepticism from members of the audience, but Seligmann remained firm in
his outlook as he spoke of the growing desire amongst corporations to act
as partners with, rather than predators of, our ecosystems.
Ann Tutwiler of Biodiversity International then followed, with a stark picture
of the rapid decline in biodiversity in recent years. She began by
describing how of the 250,000 globally identified plant species, 7,000 of
them have been used by humans throughout history, but now only 3 of
these provide 60% of our total energy intake. Specific plant families tell a
similar story: there are 3,000 varieties of the quinoa grain but we largely
consume only 2; there are 1,000 varieties of banana but we mostly eat only
one, known as the cavendish; and there are thousands of varieties of rice,
but only a dozen are now widely grown.
Tutwiler pointed out that the regions of the globe that are rich in
biodiversity also have high rates of poverty and that this is a precarious
position to be in, as farmers struggling on the bread line wont choose to
conserve their ecosystems unless they have a perceived use for biodiverse
species. Lastly, Tutwiler sited some fascinating research recently conducted
in post-disaster zones in Central America, that found that those farms with
greater biodiversity experienced only 50% loss of crops, as compared with
the 100% losses experienced by conventional farms in the same areas. The
biodiverse farms were also able to recover more quickly than their
conventional counterparts.
Last to speak in this session was Mike Clarke, Chief Executive of the RSPB.
Clarke also presented a bleak and shocking scenario, currently faced by
bird populations around the world. He told us that since 1980, birds have
been dying at a rate of 1 every 8 minutes. Many species are heading
towards extinction, and Clarke gave the example of the turtle-dove which,
according to current levels of decline, will be extinct within 7 years largely
because of a decline of wild flowers. Clarke referred us to the brilliant
publication entitled The State of the Worlds Birdlife, which was launched
earlier this year and is available to download here. He concluded by saying
that the cost of a declining link between nature and human beings is too
great, and that it is crucial that the SFT succeeds in making true cost
accounting happen.
After a short break, we reconvened for the final session of the day: Testing
the Proposition: Debate. A panel of five experts was gathered to discuss
ideas and plans for action, and was comprised of the following:
Peter Blom Chief Executive of Triodos Bank
Henry Robinson Deputy President of the Country Land and Business
Association
Ellen Gustafson Co-founder of Food Tank, USA
Richard Mattison, Chief Executive of Trucost
Patrick Holden Chief Executive of SFT
John Humphrys of Radio 4 chaired the panel and opened the discussion
with a flurry of media related (and food unrelated) jokes. I was hoping this
session would be a fitting end to a rich, thought-provoking day; that it
would be an opportunity to digest what we had learnt, and to identify, or
at least begin to discuss, what steps would come next. It did seem though
that Humphrys misjudged the mood at the conference it had been
buoyant, serious and determined and instead, by unnecessarily and quite
patronisingly grilling most people that spoke, he created one of
antagonism and frustration.
As a result, most of the questions that came from the audience were
attempts to defend organics, local food or the SFT vision, when instead it
would have been more helpful to integrate lessons and ideas that had
arisen in earlier sessions. That aside, the panel were robust in the face of
Humphrys interrogations, and Gustafson was particularly eloquent as she
defended the need for affordable, healthy and safe food for all.
Having now digested the day, there are a few questions that remain for me.
For one, there are clearly some externalities that are easier to quantify, in
terms of cost, than others. We can be certain of the cost of a short term
clean up job, but how would we establish the financial cost of child labour,
life-threatening disease or the extinction of a native bird species?
Complications of assigning costs arise not only because such externalities
have multifaceted and complex consequences, but also in that there might
be a danger of reducing what is invaluable life and health to a matter of
economics. Reframing ecology in terms that policy makers understand may
push the debate into political circles, but arent we then ignoring the
sacredness and preciousness of the ecosystems that sustain us, and the
value that they hold far beyond the market place?
A further question I have is around what would need to happen to make
true cost accounting a reality. It would require support and commitment
from policy makers if the market is to be restructured in such a way that
protecting the environment becomes more financially profitable than
damaging it. And I wonder whether being so reliant on the current system
and the political will within it, could prevent the radical changes hoped for
by the SFT. But I am still deeply excited about the SFT vision and am
optimistic about their ability to realise it. Most of my optimism comes, I
think, from the strength of feeling and collective dedication to this vision,
displayed from so many sides of the food debate at this conference.
I am also particularly encouraged by the broadening of the definition of
sustainability that was evident throughout many presentations and
discussions one that is concerned not only with the lowering of CO2
levels in the atmosphere, but includes also the need to protect our bird
populations, to eliminate child labour, to support community cohesion, to
prevent the use of pesticides that cause life-threatening diseases, to halt
the destruction of virgin forests, to make affordable, nutritious food widely
available, and to create an economic system that values all of the above.

Dr. Bhargava A talk with a top Indian biologist.
Early in the morning, my phone gave a tinkle. It was a reminder based on a
calendar event I had created, to call Dr. Bhargava early my morning when it
was late evening in Hyderabad India, where he stayed.
Dr Pushpa M. Bhargava is a well known man. He is founder and former
director, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India;
former vice chair, National Knowledge Commission, Govt of India; former
member, National Security Advisory Board; Nominee of the Supreme Court
of India on the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee of the Govt of
India.
Some of the relevant points discussed were:
Bt. Cotton : This has proven to be bad for India. There is mounting
evidence of link between rising farmer suicide and Bt. Cotton. Dr. Bhargava
states that he has checked his records going back several decades and in
fact has the necessary documents to show the increase in farmer suicide in
the Cotton farming belt started in large scale since introduction of Bt.
Cotton. He further claims that the Bt. gene is a dangerous item and needs
to be banned altogether. He feels optimistic that this will happen in India.
However, he believes banning of Bt. Cotton will not come from the
Government itself, which is focussed on promoting interest of western
corporations. The change will come from public pressure, and the
significant role being played by the Indian CIvil Society. This may even turn
out to be an election issue next year. Dr. Bhargava further stated that the
Govt. of Philippines had invited Dr. Bhargava for his views on some of the
Bt. Crops such as Bt. Brinjal and had more or less followed his
recommendation in rejecting it in their country.
Roundup Ready crop : According to Dr. Bhargava, this is an even bigger
disaster than the Bt. Cottons. But thankfully, it is not introduced in India at
all, except in small experiments and field trials. Unfortunately, the
Agricultural Minister of India is pushing all he can to promote Western
Patented and clearly detrimental technology of GM crop for questionable
scientific or ethical reasons. Nonetheless, Roundup Ready crops are a long
distance away from large scale introduction in India.
Bt. Brinjal : There was a major groundswell of opposition against Bt. Brinjal
in India a few years ago, that prompted the then minister of environment
Mr. Jairam Ramesh to investigate the pros and cons issue of the Bt. crop
and put a moratorium on it, essentially banning it from India for the
foreseeable future. This happened in spite of the money poured into media
campaign by corporations and the support the GM crop got from most of
the Government and business class. This was perhaps the first major
setback for GM crop globally, and set the stage for the rest of the issues.
Supreme Court Case : There is a ground breaking case unfolding in the
Indian Supreme Court where top Indian scientific expert committee has
advised the Court in a case against the Govt of India, about the harmful
effects of GM technology. It is possible that the Supreme Court might force
the hand of Govt of India in banning most of the GM crops for now.
Biopiracy : There is another interesting case ongoing in a High Court,
initiated by civil society individuals against the Govt of India, providing
evidence that Monsanto and its partner have violated the National
Biological Diversity Act (2002) by using a variety of Indian eggplant (brinjal)
without obtaining the permission of Government of India for such use as
required according to Indian laws to produce GM brinjal. This is in essence
an act of Biopiracy. The court has seen the evidence and has agreed that
the Indian law has been violated and instructed Govt of India to sue
Monsanto and its partner, which the Govt is now proceeding to do, but
trying to find ways to scuttle the case as far as possible.
Illegal introduction of GM crop : India does not have a good laboratory
that can quickly check if a crop is GM or not. Taking advantage of that, a
lot of GM crops have sneaked into the Indian food chain, such as imported
snacks based on GM corn, GM soya etc. This is as such illegal, but the
mechanism is not in place to check it and the law regarding safeguards are
not properly implemented. There is a lack of awareness on these issues.
Govt Policy on GM: Unfortunately, it is now a well known fact that Indian
policy is being tuned to support American interests and to solve Americas
problems rather than Indias own national interest. This is so well known
that even Indian politicians accept it unofficially. This too is likely to be an
election issue next year. Globalization has allowed an unprecedented level
of influence by foreign corporations on national policy making of many
countries.
Indian Civil Society: It is also an emerging fact that, in spite of corruption,
illiteracy and poverty that ravages India, the Indian Civil Society is likely
doing a ground breaking job and achieving better success than almost
anywhere else, in fighting the menace of GM crop issue.
Golden Rice: The whole issue of Golden rice is a kind of hoax. It is touted
as a solution to vitamin-A deficiency in the third world. It is patented
technology, but the patent holder states it is not going to claim intellectual
rights on it for now. Calculations show that a man might have to eat 15 Kg
of this rice every day to get his normal daily needs of Vitamin-A. This is
absurd. This means Vitamin-A has to be taken in primarily from other
supplementary food and not from rice, either GM or organic. The aim may
be for Golden rice to push out and make extinct all other major strains of
rice. Once the competition is gone, then the patent holder begins to
increase price of seed and demand intelectual rights to the seed.
Science Research off base : Indian Govt has been, unfortunately, tuning its
science research institutions to solve American problems and not Indian
problems.
Food supply : The main idea of the GM seed business plan is to control the
world food supply the biggest business in the world. It is not designed to
solve either hunger or poverty. It is designed to establish a stranglehold
and a monopoly on the world food supply.
Dr. Bhargava has seen the above text and approves it. He can be contacted
at : bhargava.pm@gmail.com Posted by Tony Mitra on March 30, 2013 on
tonu.org
What is the common ground between art and science? And
how is Beethoven like Darwin?
Nima Arkani-Hamed, Martha Kearney and Ian McEwan at London's Science
Museum Photograph: Jennie Hills/Science Museum
DO THE TWO CULTURES STILL EXIST?
IAN McEWAN: That old, two-culture matter is still with us, ever since [CP]
Snow promulgated it back in the 50s. It still is possible to be a flourishing,
public intellectual with absolutely no reference to science but it's
happening less and less. And I think it's less a change of any decision in the
culture at large, just a social reality pressing in on us. And it's true that
climate change forces us to at least get a smattering of some idea of what
it is to predict systems that have more than two or three variables and
whether this is even possible. The internet has created sites like John
Brockman's wonderful edge.org, where it's possible for laymen to sit in on
conversations between scientists. And when scientists have to address each
other out of their specialisms they have to speak plain English, they have to
abandon their jargons, and we're the beneficiaries of that.
NIMA ARKANI-HAMED: It's an asymmetry that doesn't really need to exist.
Certainly many scientists are very appreciative of the arts. The essential gulf
is one of language and especially in theoretical physics, the basic difficulty
is that most people don't understand our language of mathematics which
we use to describe everything we know about the universe. And so while
I'm capable of listening to and intensely enjoying a Beethoven sonata or an
Ian McEwan novel it can be more difficult for people in the arts to have
some appreciation for what we do. But at a deeper level there's a
commonality between certain parts of the arts and certain parts of the
sciences.
IM: I'm one of those know-nothing liberal arts students who at the age of
16 remembers a maths teacher coming into the room and saying "I'll take
10 of you volunteers and I'll get you through A-level maths" so us English,
history, French types went and were patiently taken through and it was the
most intellectually difficult and delightful thing I ever did. And the highest I
got was calculus. I thought I had reached my intellectual ceiling. Now that's
first steps for any maths undergraduate but it gave me a taste for the sort
of respect for a society where you couldn't really claim to be any sort of
intellectual unless you had some kind of foot in the world of mathematics.
So I think we're in a situation of awkward respect. You go into Westminster
Abbey and Dirac's equation is carved in stone. To stand there and look at
it, I think even for those of us who've got very little grasp of maths, can be
a kind of aesthetic experience.
NA-H: One of the things that we try to do sometimes in explaining what's
going on in physics is to find useful analogies and metaphors. But we could
be doing a better job explaining the structure in which we're having these
thoughts, explaining why we're doing what we're doing, explaining the
pursuit of truth with a capital T which is underlying all of it: what it is that
motivates people to spend three decades working with not necessarily a
payoff in sight until, every now and then, we celebrate these tremendous
achievements. There is an obsessive element to it which should be familiar
to the artist to many people in society. And it's driven by the pursuit of
something much, much bigger than ourselves and the little trivial concerns
of everyday life.
SCIENCE, ART AND THE IDEA OF BEAUTY
NA-H: There's a very common metaphor for describing the Higg's particle.
It's this idea of the universe filled with something and the little ball bearing
or whatever it was passing through the fluid picking up some inertia. That's
a good example of a metaphor that gives some sense of what's actually
going on. There's a difficulty with metaphors, which is that you can't take
them too far they're not literally what's going on. And often when that
analogy is used there's some clever person in the audience, normally a 12-
year-old kid, who puts up their hand and says "Excuse me, isn't that just
like the ether? Didn't you guys learn anything?" And that's when we have
to say: "Trust us. It's something that fills the universe that's not like the
ether" and so there's always a limitation to metaphors. It is possible to
explain some of these things. This is one of the wonderful things about
fundamental physics. The essential ideas are simple. The possible answers
to essential open questions are more complicated but the essential issues
are deep and they're simple to state. And with some patience it's possible
to address them head on and get a sense for what's going on without all
the details of the mathematics. But it requires a very engaged audience
and it can't be done casually.
IM: Nima has written a stunning essay for the layman called The Future of
Fundamental Physics. There's not a line of maths in it. I'm not going to
pretend it's easy reading but you wrote it, I think, for anyone who's
interested in that question, outside the field. I think we've lived through a
golden age of science writing. Natural selection is not a very difficult idea
but its consequences cascade beautifully. Bayes' Theorem is not very
difficult, I mean it's almost arithmetic and yet the applications it now has in
neuroscience are formidable. So I think we can cross these fields together
and I'm very interested in the aesthetics of this. There's that famous remark
of Jim Watson's, when Rosalind Franklin came to look at his and Crick's
model of a DNA molecule, that it was too beautiful not to be true. Again
we come into this field in which the aesthetics of something in the Keatsian
sense beautiful and true must embrace both subjects.
NA-H: We often talk of the idea of beauty in theories. And I think if this is
interpreted loosely you won't get really a sense of what we mean. We have
to be a little more specific. Ideas that we find beautiful are not a capricious
aesthetic judgment. It's not fashion, it's not sociology. It's not something
that you might find beautiful today but won't find beautiful 10 years from
now. The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful
for all eternity. And the reason is, what we mean by beauty is really a
shorthand for something else. The laws that we find describe nature
somehow have a sense of inevitability about them. There are very few
principles and there's no possible other way they could work once you
understand them deeply enough. So that's what we mean when we say
ideas are beautiful. A year ago I ran into this great lecture on YouTube by
Leonard Bernstein about the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth. And
Bernstein used precisely this language not approximately this language
exactly this language of inevitability, perfect accordance to its internal
logical structure and how difficult and tortuous it was for Beethoven to
figure out. He used precisely the same language we use in mathematics
and theoretical physics to describe our sense of aesthetics and beauty.
IM: You don't hear beauty much mentioned even by composers in relation
to modern music. It's not the common pursuit. For my taste all atonal music
sounds like an expression of anxiety. And yet I think we do need a return to
this in the arts. I don't think we have much trouble in poetry with this.
Seamus Heaney died recently and there was a lot of time to reflect on his
work, and the beauty of those lines, of his work was constantly referenced.
Part of the problem was modernism, the great aesthetic revolution of the
early 20th century to which we are all bound and must work in gratitude for
but we lost certain things. Along the way emotion and art were
somewhat detached. When I was a student at Sussex University we had to
write essays on a statement by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset in
which he said "tears and laughter are aesthetic frauds". This was the pure,
high, modernist statement, that you had to detach those feelings about
emotion and beauty from art itself.
THE DAILY LIVES OF ARTISTS AND SCIENTISTS
IM: I often wonder what theoretical physicists do all day and my fantasy is
they are rather like novelists. They sit around with their feet on the radiator
staring out the window with a notepad within reach. They must be in the
world of that kind of misty, drifting, creative thinking that has a bit of
talent, a bit of luck, a bit of being shaped by current mood that can bring
sudden insight. To wonder how to progress or even start a novel is to enter
a state of what V S Pritchett called determined stupor, and those of us who
are paid to be in that state count ourselves very lucky.
NA-H: I've always thought composers and novelists are probably very close
to mathematicians and theoretical physicists psychologically in how they go
about things.
Perhaps contrary to a certain sort of mythology people don't go to their
offices and just churn through equations. You have a certain set of
questions you are trying to solve and you have to imagine what the story
could possibly be for what the solution is. You have to try to imagine what
the sort of global answer could possibly look like or at least chunks of the
global answer. You try on stories could it work like that? And often
because of the underlying rigidity, the same thing that gives rise to the
beauty that we talked about, it's beauty because there is a right and
wrong. There is some problem that's being solved. If the story is a great
story it has a better chance of being right than if it's a crappy story. And
sometimes stories are too good to be true and that happens very often.
And we try out what could possibly be solutions to the problems and then
we have to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as we possibly can. And that's
what 99% of our life is about. We try out stories and we prove them wrong.
So you have this experience of failing day after day after day and it's a
particularly intensely bad feeling to fail so much because you know what
success looks like and you can't fool yourself when you're not there. So
even though you don't know what the solution is, you know when you
don't have it. You have to keep going and going until gradually you fail
better and better and better and every now and then, once every two or
three years, something works.
IM: Here is a major difference. I'm well aware in science how important it is
to be first. Being second with the structure of DNA would consign you to
the dustbin of history, whereas every novelist knows that you're in a self-
sustaining world in which whatever you say is so. It's for others to accept it
or reject it. I often pity those scientists who are in a race just to get on the
public record for the first time days, weeks before someone else and
your life can be transformed. Crick and Watson are a perfect case of this. If
[Linus] Pauling had got there before them we wouldn't have heard of Jim
Watson. It's a tougher world.
NA-H: It's one of the classic things we talk about, the difference between
art and science. Even here there's more commonality than meets the eye.
But I want to say one thing about originality at an even baser level of how
easy it is to be original, how much innate, intrinsic talent is needed to be
able to do something. And here we [scientists] have an advantage there's
this thing out there that we're not inventing but discovering. And because
of that all you have to do is get somewhere in the neighbourhood of the
truth. You don't have to get particularly close to it, you just have to know
that it's there and then you have to not fight it and just let it drag you in
toward itself. If you're very talented you might hack your way there more
quickly. If you're less talented you might have to pinball around and it takes
a little longer to get there.
IM: That fateful morning when one of his children was extremely ill and
Darwin opened a 20-page letter from [Alfred Russel] Wallace and said "All
my originality is smashed". The anxiety attack that Darwin had then, no
novelist could have such a thing.
NA-H: What you're talking about the anxiety, who gets the credit and so
on this is important to the individuals involved. It's of no importance in
the grand scheme of things. But there is an important sense in which even
the same discoveries, even the same existing body of knowledge, the
things that are sitting there in textbooks for hundreds of years already, are
perceived in different ways by different scientists. Because to be able to do
anything new you have to organise the existing body of knowledge in
some unique way that's your way of thinking about it. One of the deeper
reasons why it's important to have different people approaching the same
problem even if they end up finding the same solution is the path
towards a solution suggests many divergent ways things could progress
and having many of those paths is still useful.
IM: Writing a novel takes roughly about the time of an undergraduate
course for me and you might draw on the work of a historian, you might
need to read a biography of a composer. I would like to feel that we could
think about science as just one more aspect of organised human curiosity
rather than as a special compartment. And it has, as has been very clear
from this discussion, a powerful aesthetic. I think we need to generalise it.
We need to absorb it into our sense that we can love the music of
Beethoven without being composers and we could love science as a
celebration of human ingenuity without being scientists.
Science has had a huge effect on my own sense of the world. It certainly
has helped me along the way to a general global scepticism about religion.
The world of faith is inimical to the world of science and in that sense
science has helped me want to write books every now and then that
celebrate a full-blooded rationalism. It's one of our delightful aspects and it
informs what we try to do with our laws and social policy. We don't succeed
a lot of the time. And we despair of human relationships at the most
private level when they're irregular or contradictory. We demand even of
our lovers a degree of coherence and behind that lies a notion of
consistency and rationality. Enduring Love was actually a novel wishing to
oppose the romantic notion that abstraction and logic and rationality and
science in particular was a cold-hearted thing, a myth I think which began
with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We need to reclaim our own sense of the
full-bloodedness, the warmth of what's rational.

The Science of Social Connections
Source: edge.org
[NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS:] The part of human nature that I'd like to talk
about today is that part of our human nature that is relevant to our
interactions with others. There's been a phenomenal amount of work
taking place in the last ten years, certainly, and even in the last year or two
that seeks to understand how we interact with each other and how we
assemble ourselves into social networks.
If you think about it, humans are extremely unusual as a species in that we
form long-term, non-reproductive unions to other members of our species;
namely, we have friends. Why do we do this? Why do we have friends? It's
not hard to construct an argument as to why we would have sex with other
people, but it's rather more difficult to construct an argument as to why we
would befriend other people. Yet we, and very few other species, do this
thing. So I'd like to problematize that; I'd like to problematize friendship
first.
Second, not only do we have friends but we prefer the company of people
we resemble. There's an enormous literature on in-group bias and on why
this might be the case. A lot of this literature, to my eye, takes the form of
what I would regard to be a tautological explanation. Why do we prefer the
company of people we resemble? Because we're more comfortable when
we are with people we resemble. Why are we more comfortable when
we're hanging out with people we resemble? Because they resemble us.
And I'd actually like to try to find a deeper explanation for why we befriend
other individuals; why we assemble ourselves into networks with what turn
out to be very fundamental, reproducible topologies (structures); and why
we prefer the company of people we resemble.

And, in fact, the ubiquity and necessity of social interactions carries with it
a suite of other phenomena, like cooperation, which is very deeply and
fundamentally important; sensing (the ability to see what's happening in
others); communication; social learning; epidemics; violence all of these
phenomena arise not so much within individuals, but rather at the
interstices between individuals. They're not so much nodal phenomena
having to do with the nodes on the networksbut edge phenomena
phenomena that have to do with the connections between the individuals.
In fact, I'd like to think that the focus on networks calls into question some
very old ideas about human nature, and about what the state of nature
really is for human beings. Joe Henrich, in an interview he did for Edge a
couple of years ago, had a very nice, pithy summary of this. He asks why do
we see market economies as all about competition for advantage? Actually,
you can just rethink the existence of market economies as all about
cooperation. Why do we have to see them as being competitive rather
than as cooperative enterprises?
We can shift our perspective on lots of things when we think about people
as being nodes on a graph, as being connected to other people. And this
shift in focus might, in fact, prompt us to begin to think about not the
individuals themselves"but the ties between them. This calls to mind an
analogy, which I don't know if some of you may already know, of streets in
the United States and in European countries. So, streets have names in our
country, and the houses on the streets are numbered numerically and
linearly as you move along the street. And the blocks between the streets
don't have names or numbers and are seen as the things that are between
the streets, and we don't pay much attention to them. But if you go to
Japan, it's the blocks that are numbered. The blocks have names and the
houses on the blocks are numbered in the order in which they were built,
not numerically or linearly in any kind of systematic way. If you ask the
Japanese, "What's going on with the streets?" they say, "The streets are
the spaces between the blocks." They don't pay attention to those.
We can even begin to think about human beings in this fashion. We're so
interested in understanding human beings that we lose sight of the
connections between them. And just like we can efface the individual, to
some extentand I don't have a strong argument that we should do this,
but I have what I would regard to be a weak argument why it's beneficial or
useful as a heuristic to do thisjust like we can begin to efface individuals
by thinking about the selfish genes within them, we can also begin to
efface individuals by thinking about the connections outside them.
So, the question I'm asking myself lately is: What would a social science of
connections, rather than a social science of individuals, look like? What
would it mean to take connections as the focus of inquiry and to think
about the individuals as the spaces between the connections who are not
so important? And then we begin to think about all the dyadic interactions
between individuals, which are themselves natural phenomena, just like we
are. I'm an object of the natural world, but so are my connections between
me and all the other people, so are those connections objects of the
natural world which warrant an explanation and a kind of deep and
profoundin my judgmentstudy.
In fact, this would have a variety of conceptual and methodological
problems. And some people would say that this is a really horrible
perspective, that it obliterates our individuality, that it's dehumanizing, and
so forth. But I would retort to that by saying, What makes us think that the
ties between us are any less important or worthy of attention than the
individuals themselves?
One of the things that we've been doing is asking ourselves what is the
reason that we form these ties? What's the function of these edges and
these connections between us? One of the things that's very interesting to
us is that these edges between individuals, these networks that we form,
have properties that are not reducible to the individuals. They offer us a
kind of an understanding of emergence, a new kind of emergent
phenomena. And these properties, while they are properties of groups,
actually, as it turns out, have implications for individuals.
We're so interested in understanding human beings that we lose sight of
the connections between them.
Let me give you an example. This is very visual and, given this format, I'm
not supposed to use visuals, but I'm going to cheat and use one slide in a
moment. Let's say you had 1,000 people, and, on average, they each have
five connections, so you have 5,000 ties between them. Mathematically,
you could construct a number of ways in which you could organize these
networks. You could have a random network where people are jumbled
together; you could have a big ring network; you could have a kind of
scale-free network; you could have the kind of network that we humans
actually make (which has a variety of properties). It turns out that if you
were designing the network from mathematical principles so that the
network would be the most resistant to pathogens taking root within it; so,
you say, "I want to organize these people in such a fashion that this group,
when so organized, resists epidemics;" whereas, if they'd been organized
some other way, these same people who otherwise were identicalhad
the same immune systems, the same biologythis group no longer
resisted epidemics so well. If you wanted to give the group the epidemic
resistance property, the way you would organize the people is to give them
a property in network science known as degree assortativity. You would
make popular people befriend popular people and unpopular people
befriend unpopular people. You could give them this property, it would
make the network as a whole resistant to germs being able to make
inroads.
And I can cultivate this intuition by asking you to think about the airport
network in this country. The airport network is degree disassortative.
Chicago is connected to lots of small airports but, in the small airports, you
can't fly from one to the other; they are disconnected from each other.
Whereas people don't have that property. Popular people befriend popular
people, and unpopular befriend unpopular. Now, think about which of
those two networks, if you were a bioterrorist and you wanted to seed a
germ in, which network would the germ spread more rapidly? In the airport
network, right? If you start any random node, like an isolated small town, it
will go to Chicago, and, in the next hop, it will reach the whole nation. But
if you had the hubs and the spokes or the peripheral airports connected to
each other, it would be relatively more impervious to a pathogen
spreading.
I don't think it's a coincidence that of all the kinds of ways human beings
could organize themselves into networks, that's what we do. We evince
degree assortativity, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we do that. We
assemble ourselves into groups, the group now has this property, this
germ- resistance property, which is a property of the group, but which, as it
turns out, also benefits and affects us. Now, being a member of that group,
we are less likely to acquire pathogens.
And this sets the stage for a set of ideas that we and others have been
exploring that shed light on multi-level selection and other kinds of
contentious ideas in the biological and the social sciences. And we have a
number of fellow travelers on this roadLszl Barabsi, Dirk Helbing,
Tooby and Cosmides, Frans de Waal, Nowak, Rand, Santospeople
working on these related areas of interactions among animals and people,
and what this means. In fact, David Rand and Josh Green and Martin
Nowak just had a nice paper this past year I was asked to highlight some
paperslooking at whether you can use time to response as a kind of
heuristic for understanding are people intuitive cooperators and rationally
selfish, or do they exercise rational self-control over a kind of instinctive
greed? The data they presented in that paper, to my eyes, was quite
compellingthat we are intuitively wired to cooperate.
James and I published a paper last year as well, also in Nature, where we
had the following idea: We said, well, what we would love to do is, if the
claim is that there's something deep and fundamental about human social
networks and the structure of networks, we would love to be able to go
back 10,000 years to the Pleistocene and look at what kind of networks did
humans assemble themselves into, before we invented agriculture, and
cities, and communication, and so forth?
We did the next best thing to that, which is to map the social networks of
the Hadza hunter-gatherers. There's only about 1,000 of them left; only
about 500 of them still live in the traditional way. They are a natural fertility
population; they have no material possessions to speak of; they sleep
under the stars. And when we map their social networks, their networks
l ook j ust l i ke ours. So, despi te al l of modern technol ogy,
telecommunication, the Internet and everything else, the structural features
of their networks are indistinguishable from the structural features of our
networks, suggesting to my eye, again, that there is something very
fundamental, not just about the structure of our bodies and our minds, but
also about the structure of our societies.
This is some of the work that's been going on in a number of fronts the last
few years, trying to understand the social interactions, social networks, and
the kind of constituent elements of that cooperation and the like. But
then that leads to what I like to call the so-what question. So what if we can
understand the structure and function of networks? What can we do with
this knowledge, not necessarily to make the world better, but actually to
intervene in the world in some way? And if you think about it, that's also
one of the tests of science. I mean, as a scientist, can you actually
understand the natural world well enough that you can actually seize
control of the natural world in some way and make it obey certain
fundamental rules?
I'm going to close with some summaries of a few experiments that have
taken place over the last couple of years, and then a bigger idea as the
final point. Let me just summarize a few pieces of work that are going on in
my field that are very cool at the moment. There are two broad categories
of work: One category of work is, can we manipulate the structure, the
topology, of the network? Can we take control of the nature of the ties
between people and drive the network to desired states? The second is,
can we manipulate, not the connection, but the contagion within the
network? Given the structure of the network, how can we seed the
network? How can we introduce information strategically within locations
that make the group behave in desirable ways that we specify? Can we
show that we've mastered and understood this world well enough that we
can actually intervene in it?
One experiment that was done by a former postdoc of mine [Damon
Centola], that was published a couple of years ago now, is this. And I have
to show you this image. So, this is an image of experimentally constructed
networks. There are two networks in this image. There's just no way you
could describe these two networks. Both of these networks have 128
people in them, and in both of these networks each person is connected to
exactly six other people? So, if you talk to the human beings in these
networks, and ask them, "How many friends do you have? " and they say,
"I have six friends. " And every one of them in both of these worlds would
say, "I have six friends." They cannot tell the difference between the two
worlds which they inhabit?
Now, suppose I'm going to infect the personthe yellow dot that's up
herewith a germ. In which of these two worlds do you think the germ
would spread more rapidly and more completely throughout the network?
From the point of view of the individual, there's no way of telling what
world they're in, but from the point of view of us, with this God's eye view,
we should have an intuition in which of these two worlds is the germ more
likely to spread? And the answer is the network on the left. This random
assembly means that, ping, ping, ping, in the next step, the germ will
spread from the yellow dot to the six red dots, and then from there to the
others, and you'll flush through the system, you'll get a blooming of the
information spreading or the germ spreading or whatever. And these are
things that spread by so-called simple contagion.
Now, I'm going to ask you something different and more difficult. Imagine
now what is to spread within the network is not germs or information but, a
behavior, for example, smoking cessation or cooperation. Something more
complex. It turns out that the world on the right is the world that is more
conducive to the spread of such phenomena. So the topology of the
network, which can be seen from above, is what's relevant to whether or
not these group-level properties can emerge and be sustained. So this was
an experiment that was done to show that.
We did an experiment in our lab where we recruited over 2,000 people
online, and we brought them into these virtual worlds, and the subjects
played a public goods game with people near them, a kind of cooperative
game with those around them who they were randomly assigned. Then, we
controlled in that world whether or not people could rewire their networks
and the amount that they could rewire them, by which we meant not only
can you, if you defect from me, can I reciprocate by defecting, or, if you
cooperate, I can reciprocate by cooperating, but we gave me another tool,
which is that I could cut the ties or form ties to people. So I could form ties
to cooperators and cut ties to defectors. And then we manipulated the
viscosity with which that could be done.
What we found was that actually we could control the amount of
cooperation that emerged in this group of people by specifying the rules of
interaction. If we allowed people to rewire their ties just the right amount,
then cooperation in the group would appear above and beyond and
independent of the individuals themselves and their own tendencies. So we
can elicit from the group a property, namely, cooperation, by controlling
the nature of interactions. Second experiment.
A number of other experiments have been done with contagion
phenomena. So, given a structure of human interactions in an African
village, in a trading floor on Wall Street, in schools in the United States,
whatever the setting is, can you strategically introduce information in such
a fashion that you can get people to behave in particular ways? There was
just a paper published by Matt Jackson and Esther Duflo a couple of weeks
ago in Science looking at microfinance. So if you want to get the adoption
of microfinance in a setting in Indian villages, who do you target so that if
you get them to use the microfinance you get the most spillover and the
most rapid diffusion of innovation?
If we could find ways of identifying central people using big data or other
techniques, and monitor them passively or actively, when we observe a
spike in central people it means that an epidemic's about to strike the
population.
Another nice paper that was done by my colleague, James Fowler and all
of the work that I'm describing to you, virtually all of it, has been done
jointly with Jamesis the following: James did a beautiful paper as well
last year in Nature where they randomly assigned 61 million people online
to a voting intervention and were able to show that actually showing
people a very seemingly trivial stimulus drove, not only the individuals
themselves to be more likely to vote, but their friends to be more likely to
vote, and their friends' friends to be more likely to vote. So he showed a
spread of civic-mindedness to two degrees of separation within this
massive experiment done with 61 million people. In fact, it's estimated that
an extra 300,000 people turned out to vote on that election because of
James's experiment. Actually our democracy was improved because of the
scientists actually doing their work in that particular occasion.
There's been some other nice work on product adoption using experiments
online: how can we get people to adopt products? And we're in the field
right now doing some experiments where we've mapped the networks of
32 highland villages in Honduras, and we're trying to see, if we can only
reach 5 percent of the people, which 5 percent should we reach so that we
get the whole village to change its mind about clean water and nutrition
outcomes? And we're randomly assigning the villages to different targeting
algorithms. In some villages, we pick 5 percent of the people at random; in
other villages we pick them according to one targeting algorithm; and still
another according to another targeting algorithm, and we have very
promising results from this study.
There's also a sense in which you can now use networksand there's been
some nice work done in the last year or so, summarizing my fieldwherein
now, instead of introducing information into the system, you can think
about networks as kinds of sensorsextracting information from the
system. So, for example, if you think about it, just a moment ago, we
cultivated the intuition that if you target information to particular
individuals, they're going to be more able to spread whatever it is that's
happening in the network.
Let me ask you to think about this, since I can't use slides. Imagine a
network. There are ties and there are little nodes between them. Most of
you probably have an image that, in the middle, there's a kind of jumble,
like Christmas tree lights. When you open them up after a year, there's a
thick knot in the middle, and there are these little tendrils that spread out
to edges, that's what a network kind of looks like. Imagine that I can ask
you, "You can be a person in the middle of that, and have four friends; or
you could be a person on the edge of that and have four friends. Now a
deadly germ is spreading through the network. Who would you rather be?
The person in the middle or the person on the edge?" The person on the
edge. You have the intuition that the person in the middle is going to be
on more paths through the system and you can formalize this
mathematically and is going to be more likely to get whatever's
spreading through the system. This very simple idea was an idea that we
exploited by recognizing that if we could identify who were the central
people in networks, and passively monitor them, we would have an early
warning system for epidemics. So, the epidemic curve is a classic S-shaped
curve that goes up like this. That S-shaped curve should be shifted to the
left in central individuals compared to random individuals within the
system.
So, if we could find ways of identifying central peopleusing big data or
other techniquesand monitor them passively or actively, when we
observe a spike in central people, it means that an epidemic is about to
strike the population. This can also be done with economic information or
any kind of information that spreads through the system. We were able to
show that this works with an outbreak of H1N1 flu a couple of years ago
now, and in the last year we also showed that it works on Twitter. James
and I know nine days before anyone else what's going to be popular on
Twitter, because we see it spiking in the individuals that are at particular
topological locations within the network.
To sum up, this is new work that has been taking place over the last year or
two in my field, which is network studies and the study of social psychology
relevant to interactions and in sociology (not all of sociology or all of
psychology, just my little niche where I sit), and the biology of these types
of things, has a number of features. First, this work is increasingly
experimental in nature; so, more and more people are doing experiments.
This move to experimentation is a kind of rediscovery of a tradition of
experimentation in the social sciences. We always did experiments, but
beginning in the 1950s, we became besotted with regression models.
Psychology is a bit of an exception because they consistently have done
experiments. But we're moving back to field experiments in broader swaths
of the social sciences, and this is being abetted in part by the development
of the Internet and online experimentation. So the big data revolution
intersects with the experimental revolution by making it easier for us to do
experiments.
This new work reflects four things: First, its experimental. Second, it's
exploiting online and Internet technology. Third, there is (to my eye at
least) an increasing desire to try to find things that are deep and
fundamental about our humanity. The best social science now that is being
done seeks to go to a deeper, more fundamental level to try to explain
human behavior, at least when it comes to human interactions. And, fourth,
this work is involving interventions. If you want to construct an almost
Popperian sort of theory of science, the ability to actually...: we observe the
system; we have a hypothesis about the system; we do experiments about
the system and conclude things; and now we actually manipulate the
system (we introduce genes, we excise the genes, we do experiments in
particular ways): this shows a level of control or understanding that's very
commendable.
Collective behavior has always captivated people's interest, but, in the last
couple of years, we've been making phenomenal progress in
understanding what I would regard to be for me at least the key aspect
of our human nature, which is our interactions with others.
BROCKMAN: You mentioned point three. Could you repeat that?
CHRISTAKIS: Something that transcends individuals. Something that's very
deep and fundamental, but that transcends individuals.
BROCKMAN: I think you mentioned humanism?
CHRISTAKIS: I didn't mention humanism. No, but you're asking ...
BROCKMAN: You were imputing some kind of goodness?
CHRISTAKIS: No, I'm avoiding that because those were my marching
orders from you, John.
BROCKMAN: There is a sense in all the discourse about networks and big
data that it means good. But as Steven Pinker pointed out, the Internet
hasn't changed much in terms of human nature.
CHRISTAKIS: Yes, I think I know what you're talking about. Any technology
atomic power, gunscan be deployed for good or for evil. So, I've been
highlighting or imagining some ways in which a better understanding of
social interactions can be exploited for good. But it can also clearly be
exploited for bad. Now, this bad could be getting people to buy products
they don't need; it could be whipping up political fanaticism. Actually, if
you understand networks, you can be much more effective at fostering
Nazism. Actually, there's a way in which you can think of extreme political
ideology and how it takes root in populations, and how you would go
about structuring populations precisely to reinforce these kind of extreme
ideologies. So there are all kinds of bad things that you can use the same
technology for, and I am not unmindful of that. But I mean, the things that
we're trying to do I would think, we're trying to increase cooperation, and
make people healthier, and increase economic development in the
developing world, and everything else that Sendhil and everyone else here
is trying to do.
SANTOS: I can't help but ask the psychologist question, which is a chicken
and egg question, which I'll illustrate with chickens. So, imagine you ran
your network analysis on chickens. I don't know what chicken networks look
like ...
CHRISTAKIS: Someone's done that, by the way, but go on.
SANTOS: They don't look like humans, right?
CHRISTAKIS: No, they don't. But elephants do.
SANTOS: The primate stuff we're getting out of Cayo Santiago suggests
but other animals form networks too, but the question is that why is that,
right? And so, you started by talking about this fact that humans might
have networks that are unique or unique to more closely related primates
or whatever, but then why at the psychological level could that be? Is there
something about human cognition or human cognitive mechanisms that
allows us to form those networks, and not other species? And, if so, then it
seems to me that the individual, at least what's going on in the individual's
head, shapes this
CHRISTAKIS: I think it's fascinating. Leaving aside the eusocial insects and
clonal species, where the interactions between the individuals are
necessarily amongst kin, we're talking about non-kin relations, so we've got
primates, including us, elephants, cetaceans; what's amazing to me is that
what's known about the network mapping of these individuals, of these
species, is that those networks look incredibly similar. Elephant networks
and primate networks and dolphin networks look very much like ours.

To me this begs what is a really interesting question, which is, maybe
there's only one way to be social. I mean, why would it be the case in the
natural world that whenever we go looking at social species, leaving aside
the eusocial insects, would they evince these network properties? Because
the last common ancestor between us and whales was 60 million years ago.
So whales clearly have evolved independently, and with elephants, it's
about the same.
So, they're converging, by convergent evolution on a similar solution, not
on a bodily phenotype, but what James and I are calling an exophenotype.
So think about this (to borrow an example from Richard Dawkins): Why is it
that if a spider evolves bigger mouth parts to capture more prey, we think
of that as a kind of evolutionary adaptation; but if a spider evolves the
construction of a more elaborate web that basically achieves the same
thing, we don't necessarily think of that as a phenotype? Well, actually we
should. Let's start thinking of it as a phenotypespiderweb morphology is
a phenotype. If that's true, by a few short leaps I could get you believing
that social network construction is a phenotype. My manipulation of the
social world to construct the network around me, I would argue, is no
different than the spider's manipulation of the physical world to construct a
spider web around it.
Second, picking up on your point, what's amazing to me is that dragging
with it, not necessarily dragging with it, but walking along with the network
structure are all these other things. For example, mirror self-recognition.
Dolphins have mirror self-recognition, primates clearly do, elephants have
mirror self-recognition, cooperation, self-identity, and other-identity. So if
you're going to cooperate and form networks with non-kin, you have to be
able to know "Oh, this is June, and that's Sendhil, and that's Danny..." you
have to know who they are from moment to moment. And these other
animals also do that. So there's this suite of features that seems to be
necessary and go together for the construction of social worlds.
SANTOS: Just to follow up, do you have to be the kind of cognitive
creature who could do X, Y and Z and then you're like, "Oh, I'll talk to June
and then, ooh, the network forms?" Or does the network form and that
creates this crazy selection pressure to have these mechanisms ...
CHRISTAKIS: Yes, it's both, I think. That our social life and our biological
heritage are in a conversation across eons.
Think about this: Imagine a beaver, for whatever reason, has a chance
mutation that makes its behavior different so it constructs a bigger dam.
And now when the beaver constructs a bigger dam you get a bigger flood
behind the dam. Now across time those beavers, ideally to exploit the
greater linear perimeter of the pond that they've created, which gives them
more forging opportunities, need bigger lungs. So the beaver now,
because of the behavioral change, has to start evolving bigger lungs to be
able to be underwater more to explore this perimeter, or bigger flippers or
whatever beavers need to be effective. Okay?
Well, I think humans are like that, actually. We have little things where we
begin reworking the social world around us. That creates selection
pressures on our brains and our cognition; it makes us social. The more
social, cooperative, mirror self-recognition, all that other stuff we do, the
more able we are to create these webs around us, and it feeds back on
itself. But what's so interesting to me and James about the social world is
that, unlike the physical or the biological world, which is 'God-given' [or
exogenous] and all around us, we create the social world. We create the
selection pressure that then feeds back and contorts our minds and
contorts our bodies. That's what we think is happening.
GRUBER: You're talking about social contagion and I know earlier we
talked a little bit about emotional contagion. I'm just wondering to what
extent do you think the spreading of this phenomena is going to vary
depending on the type of network we're talking about, whether it's
specifically, I think of offline or in vivo interaction and now with the social
media networks growing and ever-increasing, and the degree to which
you're expressing emotions in these two domains is radically different.
CHRISTAKIS: One of our arguments has been that, with respect to
emotional contagion (in which we're very interested), there has to be some
relationship at stake. My emotional response to my child in pain or my
colleague in pain even, depending on the colleague, is very different than
my emotional response to a stranger in pain. I still have empathy, I'd like to
believe, and sympathy for the stranger in pain, but there's clearly
something different about it. Plus, it's also different to see the person in
pain than to read about the person in pain. So, (a) the nature of the social
tie, and (b) the visibility, are crucially important. However, I think that you
can transmit emotional states to a lesser extent, but still, through online
interactions. Like if you get a sad letter from your sister, you're going to
feel sad about it even though it's a printed word and not quite as powerful
as seeing your sister.
We have an unpublished paper, which I can talk about very briefly, in which
we exploited weather variation as an instrument. We looked at all the
residents of New York City, and if it rains in New York City, with Facebook
mapping of the whole country, their Facebook friends in cities outside of
New York are affected by the weather in New York City, to two degrees
removed. I won't go into all the details, but we did this in the
econometrically way, and so we can discern, in a kind of quasi-natural
experiment, to the extent that you believe the literature that weather
affects people's moods (which there is a nice cottage literature on this), you
can use that as a kind of, what's known as an instrument, to identify these
effects between online friendships.
KURZBAN: Like all models, there's a certain degree to which you're
abstracting, and that's a necessary feature of modeling, right? You've got
to take some stuff out. And you highlighted something that's right about
psychology, which is that we don't spend that much time thinking about
what friendship is for. There's been some assumptions about it being for
exchange and so on, and you have a different proposal.
Just to connect you back to some stuff that we've been thinking about, one
thing that seems to be important in our data about friendship is that the
nodes aren't equally weighted. The amount of time and the degree to
which I'm close to my best friend is really different from my fourth and fifth
friend. What I'm really curious about is, first of all, as a technical matter,
how easy it is to build things like that into the model. Just for the record,
my suspicion is it's going to be really important. It might even change your
packaging data.
CHRISTAKIS: Yes.
KURZBAN: Because if I spend a lot of time on doing that Right? So, as a
psychological matter, that seems like a reality, which would be very cool to
build into these sorts of things. And, again, as an empirical matter, we're
finding that there's a relatively nice function that one can use to map these
things. So, is the future of this kind of weighted edges ...
CHRISTAKIS: Yes.
KURZBAN: And what's going to happen?
CHRISTAKIS: Yes, there's a big move to weighted graphs exactly for the
reason you're describing. Every tie can get a weight now, so you can
describe ties and not just the nodes. In fact, ties can become just as
complicated as people. How long has the tie been lasting? How intimate is
the tie? How frequently do you see the person? What's the vector? Do I
say, "You're my friend" or you say "I'm your friend?" And so you can begin
to have all kinds of details, which are highly relevant, and you can weigh
the ties and use a variety of methods which allow you to take advantage
And it falls mostly as you would predict, right? So, just as you suggested,
people with whom I spend a lot of time are more important paths through
the network when it comes to germs, for example.
BROCKMAN: Unfortunately, Wallace Stevens couldn't be here today, but
he asked me to read the following excerpt from his poem, "United Dames
of America":
The mass is nothing. The number of men in a mass
Of men is nothing. The mass is no greater than
The singular man in a mass. Masses produce. Each one its paradigm."
7 Ways to Sharpen Your Focus
The more concentrated we are, the better we do at most everything. But
these days we face a stream of distractions -- and every time we get pulled
into the latest Facebook update, tweet, or email, it can take several
minutes to regain full concentration on what we're supposed to be doing.
Here are some practical ways to stay focused despite the blizzard of
distractions:
1) Manage your settings instead of letting them manage your attention.
Turn off those pop-ups that tell you you've just gotten an email and
ringtones. Those calls and messages may seem urgent, but they are not
important enough to break your focus -- get to them later. Give yourself
protected time to sustain your focus on the task at hand.
2) Mindful second thoughts help tear you away from those distractions.
When you find yourself checking your email when you should be working
on something else instead, just telling yourself 'I'm distracted now'
activates a brain circuit that makes it easier to drop what's irrelevant and
get back to focusing on your work.
3) Build up the mind's muscle for focus through a daily session of
meditating on your breath. This is the mental equivalent of working out in
the gym. The battle tension between focus and distraction takes place in
the brain's circuits for resisting impulse. In the mental gym, the more often
you catch your mind wandering off and return it to concentrating on your
breath, the stronger your concentration grows - like bulking up your pecs
on a Cybex.
4) Will power -- the key to staying focused on that important task -- wanes
with stress. Managing your stress better by reducing demands or deploying
a relaxation method you can practice as needed keeps your focus high.
5) Focus tanks when we are sleepy -- and there's an epidemic of sleep
deprivation. No matter how many hours sleep you manage to get, the real
measure of whether you are sleeping enough is whether you feel like
dozing off during the day. A short mid-day nap (if you can get away with it)
reboots your brain.
6) Eat high protein, low carb meals at breakfast and lunch. Carbs convert to
sugar quickly, giving you a burst of energy and then a crash. Proteins
become the brain's fuel more slowly, giving you a steady energy level that
helps sustain focus.
7) Sip your caffeine slowly: A steady low dose helps your focus go on and
on. Too much at once gives you a high (or nervousness) that ends in a focus
crash.
Finally, a concentrated focus is always the best attention tool for the job,
e.g., when you're looking for a creative insight. For innovative thinking it's
best to immerse first yourself in the problem with full focus, then let it go.
New connections flow most freely when you're in a relaxed, daydreamy
brain state -- on a walk, or taking a shower.
Daniel Goleman's new book FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence and
CD Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence are now available.

Heritable IQ is a sign of social mobility
By Matt Ridley, Source: rationaloptimist.com
Matt Ridley is the author of provocative books on evolution, genetics and
society. His books have sold over a million copies, been translated into
thirty languages, and have won several awards.
Please note that this blog no longer accepts comments (there was too
much spam coming in!). If you're reading this blog and want to respond
then please use the contact form on the site.
My fellow Times writer the cricketer Ed Smith posed me a very good
question the other day. How many of the people born in the world in 1756
could have become Mozart? (My answer, by the way, was four.) So heres a
similar question: how many Britons born in 1964, if educated at Eton and
Balliol, could have achieved what Boris Johnson has achieved? Its clearly
not all of them; its probably not one; but its not a big number.
My point? There is little doubt that Boris Johnson is a highly intelligent
man, notwithstanding his inability to cope with a radio ambush of IQ test
questions, and that he would be a highly intelligent man even if he had not
gone to Eton and Balliol barring extreme deprivation or injury.
The recent burst of interest in IQ, sparked first by Dominic Cummings
(Michael Goves adviser), and then by Boris, has been encouraging in one
sense. As Robert Plomin, probably the worlds leading expert on the
genetics of intelligence, put it to me, there used to be a kneejerk reaction
along the lines of you cant measure intelligence, or it couldnt possibly
be genetic. This time the tone is more like: Of course, there is some
genetic influence on intelligence but...

The evidence from twin studies, adoption studies and even from DNA
evidence is relentlessly consistent: in children, in Western society, the
heritability of IQ scores is about 50 per cent. The other half comes equally
from family (shared environment) and from unshared individual
experiences: luck, teachers, friends.
This numerical precision easily misleads us into thinking genes and
environment struggle against each other. In fact, they are like two pillars
supporting an arch: nature makes you seek out nurture, which brings out
your nature. But here is where things get interesting. The acceptance of
genetic influence on intelligence leads to some surprising, even
paradoxical implications, some of which turn the assumptions of both the
Right and the Left upside down.
First, if intelligence was not substantially genetic, there would be no point
in widening access to universities, or in grammar schools and bursaries at
private schools trying to seek out those from modest backgrounds who
have more to offer. If nurture were everything, kids unlucky enough to have
been to poor schools would have irredeemably poor minds, which is
nonsense. The bitter irony of the nature-nurture wars of the 20th century
was that a world where nurture was everything would be horribly more
cruel than one where nature allowed people to escape their disadvantages.
The Left, which has championed nurture against nature, is learning to take
a different view over homosexuality, for example, or learning disability,
genetic influence is used as an argument for tolerance. A recent Guardian
headline criticised Boris by saying gifted children are failed by the
system, which presupposes the existence of (genetically) gifted children.
The second surprise is that genetic influence increases with age. If you
measure the correlation between the IQs of identical twins and compare it
with that of adopted siblings, you find the difference grows dramatically as
they get older. This is chiefly because families shape the environments of
young children, whereas older children and adults select and evoke
environments that suit their innate preferences, reinforcing nature.
[See the new paper by Briley, D. A. , & Tucker-Drob, E. M. (in press).
Explaining the increasing heritability of cognitive ability over development:
A meta-analysis of longitudinal twin and adoption studies. Psychological
Science.]
It follows the third surprise that much of what we call the
environment proves to be itself under genetic influence. Children who
are very good at reading are likely to have parents who read a lot, schools
that give them special opportunities and friends who recommend books.
They create a reading-friendly environment for themselves. The well-
documented association between family socio-economic status and IQ,
routinely interpreted as an environmental effect, is, writes Professor Plomin
and colleagues, substantially mediated by genetic factors. Perhaps
intelligence is an appetite, at least much as an aptitude, for learning.
The fourth surprise is that the better the economy, education, and welfare
are, the more heritable IQ will be. Just as having extra food will make you
brighter if you are starving, but not if you are plump, so the same applies
to toys, teachers, books and friends. Once you have enough of any of
these things, having more will not make as much difference. So differences
due to environment will fade. In a world when some are starving and some
are kings, the differences would be mainly environmental. In a world where
all went to Balliol, the main difference remaining would be genetic. Social
reformers rarely face this fact the more we equalise opportunity, the
more the people who get to the top will be the genetically talented.
And this brings a final paradox: a world with perfect social mobility would
show very high heritability. The children of Balliol parents would qualify for
Balliol disproportionately, having inherited both aptitude and an appetite
for evoking the environments that amplified that aptitude. Far from
indicating that parents are giving their children unfair environmental
advantages, a high correlation between the achievements of parents and
offspring suggests that opportunity is being levelled, albeit slowly and
patchily. In Professor Plomins words: Heritability can be viewed as an
index of meritocratic social mobility.
Moreover, assortative mating is probably reinforcing the trend. That is to
say, 50 years ago, when women were not often allowed near higher
education, Professor Branestawm chose to marry the girl next door
because she was good at ironing his shirts, whereas today he marries
another professor because she writes gorgeous equations about quantum
mechanics, and they have children who are professors squared.
We are a long way from equality of opportunity, but when we get there we
will not find equality of outcome. Already IQ for all its flaws as an
objective measure of intelligence is good at predicting not just
educational attainment, but income, health and even longevity remarkably
well.
Do we reconcile ourselves to inequality, then? No! Just because capability
is inherited does not mean it is immutable. Hair colour and short sight are
highly heritable , but both can be altered. Education is not just about
coaxing native wit from the gifted, but also coaching it into the less gifted.$
A Formula for Happiness
HAPPINESS has traditionally been considered an elusive and evanescent
thing. To some, even trying to achieve it is an exercise in futility. It has been
said that happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always
beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon
you.
Social scientists have caught the butterfly. After 40 years of research, they
attribute happiness to three major sources: genes, events and values.
Armed with this knowledge and a few simple rules, we can improve our
lives and the lives of those around us. We can even construct a system that
fulfills our founders promises and empowers all Americans to pursue
happiness.
Psychologists and economists have studied happiness for decades. They
begin simply enough by asking people how happy they are.
The richest data available to social scientists is the University of Chicagos
General Social Survey, a survey of Americans conducted since 1972. This
widely used resource is considered the scholarly gold standard for
understanding social phenomena. The numbers on happiness from the
survey are surprisingly consistent. Every other year for four decades,
roughly a third of Americans have said theyre very happy, and about half
report being pretty happy. Only about 10 to 15 percent typically say
theyre not too happy. Psychologists have used sophisticated techniques
to verify these responses, and such survey results have proved accurate.
Beneath these averages are some demographic differences. For many
years, researchers found that women were happier than men, although
recent studies contend that the gap has narrowed or may even have been
reversed. Political junkies might be interested to learn that conservative
women are particularly blissful: about 40 percent say they are very happy.
That makes them slightly happier than conservative men and significantly
happier than liberal women. The unhappiest of all are liberal men; only
about a fifth consider themselves very happy.
But even demographically identical people vary in their happiness. What
explains this?
The first answer involves our genes. Researchers at the University of
Minnesota have tracked identical twins who were separated as infants and
raised by separate families. As genetic carbon copies brought up in
different environments, these twins are a social scientists dream, helping us
disentangle nature from nurture. These researchers found that we inherit a
surprising proportion of our happiness at any given moment around 48
percent. (Since I discovered this, Ive been blaming my parents for my bad
moods.)
If about half of our happiness is hard-wired in our genes, what about the
other half? Its tempting to assume that one-time events like getting a
dream job or an Ivy League acceptance letter will permanently bring the
happiness we seek. And studies suggest that isolated events do control a
big fraction of our happiness up to 40 percent at any given time.
But while one-off events do govern a fair amount of our happiness, each
events impact proves remarkably short-lived. People assume that major
changes like moving to California or getting a big raise will make them
permanently better off. They wont. Huge goals may take years of hard
work to meet, and the striving itself may be worthwhile, but the happiness
they create dissipates after just a few months.
So dont bet your well-being on big one-off events. The big brass ring is
not the secret to lasting happiness.
To review: About half of happiness is genetically determined. Up to an
additional 40 percent comes from the things that have occurred in our
recent past but that wont last very long.
That leaves just about 12 percent. That might not sound like much, but the
good news is that we can bring that 12 percent under our control. It turns
out that choosing to pursue four basic values of faith, family, community
and work is the surest path to happiness, given that a certain percentage is
genetic and not under our control in any way.
The first three are fairly uncontroversial. Empirical evidence that faith,
family and friendships increase happiness and meaning is hardly shocking.
Few dying patients regret overinvesting in rich family lives, community ties
and spiritual journeys.
Work, though, seems less intuitive. Popular culture insists our jobs are
drudgery, and one survey recently made headlines by reporting that fewer
than a third of American workers felt engaged; that is praised, encouraged,
cared for and several other gauges seemingly aimed at measuring how
transcendently fulfilled one is at work.
Those criteria are too high for most marriages, let alone jobs. What if we
ask something simpler: All things considered, how satisfied are you with
your job? This simpler approach is more revealing because respondents
apply their own standards. This is what the General Social Survey asks, and
the results may surprise. More than 50 percent of Americans say they are
completely satisfied or very satisfied with their work. This rises to over
80 percent when we include fairly satisfied. This finding generally holds
across income and education levels.
This shouldnt shock us. Vocation is central to the American ideal, the root
of the aphorism that we live to work while others work to live.
Throughout our history, Americas flexible labor markets and dynamic
society have given its citizens a unique say over our work and made our
work uniquely relevant to our happiness. When Frederick Douglass
rhapsodized about patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and
indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put, he struck the
bedrock of our culture and character.
Im a living example of the happiness vocation can bring in a flexible labor
market. I was a musician from the time I was a young child. That I would do
it for a living was a foregone conclusion. When I was 19, I skipped college
and went on the road playing the French horn. I played classical music
across the world and landed in the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra.
I was probably somewhat satisfied with my work. But in my late 20s the
novelty wore off, and I began plotting a different future. I called my father
back in Seattle: Dad, Ive got big news. Im quitting music to go back to
school!
You cant just drop everything, he objected. Its very irresponsible.
But Im not happy, I told him.
There was a long pause, and finally he asked, What makes you so
special?!
But Im really not special. I was lucky lucky to be able to change roads to
one that made me truly happy. After going back to school, I spent a blissful
decade as a university professor and wound up running a Washington think
tank.
Along the way, I learned that rewarding work is unbelievably important,
and this is emphatically not about money. Thats what research suggests as
well. Economists find that money makes truly poor people happier insofar
as it relieves pressure from everyday life getting enough to eat, having a
place to live, taking your kid to the doctor. But scholars like the Nobel Prize
winner Daniel Kahneman have found that once people reach a little beyond
the average middle-class income level, even big financial gains dont yield
much, if any, increases in happiness.
So relieving poverty brings big happiness, but income, per se, does not.
Even after accounting for government transfers that support personal
finances, unemployment proves catastrophic for happiness. Abstracted
from money, joblessness seems to increase the rates of divorce and suicide,
and the severity of disease.
And according to the General Social Survey, nearly three-quarters of
Americans wouldnt quit their jobs even if a financial windfall enabled them
to live in luxury for the rest of their lives. Those with the least education,
the lowest incomes and the least prestigious jobs were actually most likely
to say they would keep working, while elites were more likely to say they
would take the money and run. We would do well to remember this before
scoffing at dead-end jobs.
Assemble these clues and your brain will conclude what your heart already
knew: Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills,
empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right: Happiness lies not in the mere
possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of
creative effort.
In other words, the secret to happiness through work is earned success.
This is not conjecture; it is driven by the data. Americans who feel they are
successful at work are twice as likely to say they are very happy overall as
people who dont feel that way. And these differences persist after
controlling for income and other demographics.
You can measure your earned success in any currency you choose. You can
count it in dollars, sure or in kids taught to read, habitats protected or
souls saved. When I taught graduate students, I noticed that social
entrepreneurs who pursued nonprofit careers were some of my happiest
graduates. They made less money than many of their classmates, but were
no less certain that they were earning their success. They defined that
success in nonmonetary terms and delighted in it.
If you can discern your own project and discover the true currency you
value, youll be earning your success. You will have found the secret to
happiness through your work.
Theres nothing new about earned success. Its simply another way of
explaining what Americas founders meant when they proclaimed in the
Declaration of Independence that humans inalienable rights include life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This moral covenant links the founders to each of us today. The right to
define our happiness, work to attain it and support ourselves in the process
to earn our success is our birthright. And it is our duty to pass this
opportunity on to our children and grandchildren.
But today that opportunity is in peril. Evidence is mounting that people at
the bottom are increasingly stuck without skills or pathways to rise.
Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston shows that in the 1980s,
21 percent of Americans in the bottom income quintile would rise to the
middle quintile or higher over a 10-year period. By 2005, that percentage
had fallen by nearly a third, to 15 percent. And a 2007 Pew analysis showed
that mobility is more than twice as high in Canada and most of Scandinavia
than it is in the United States.
This is a major problem, and advocates of free enterprise have been too
slow to recognize it. It is not enough to assume that our system blesses
each of us with equal opportunities. We need to fight for the policies and
culture that will reverse troubling mobility trends. We need schools that
serve childrens civil rights instead of adults job security. We need to
encourage job creation for the most marginalized and declare war on
barriers to entrepreneurship at all levels, from hedge funds to hedge
trimming. And we need to revive our moral appreciation for the cultural
elements of success.
We must also clear up misconceptions. Free enterprise does not mean
shredding the social safety net, but championing policies that truly help
vulnerable people and build an economy that can sustain these
commitments. It doesnt mean reflexively cheering big business, but
leveling the playing field so competition trumps cronyism. It doesnt entail
anything goes libertinism, but self-government and self-control. And it
certainly doesnt imply that unfettered greed is laudable or even
acceptable.
Free enterprise gives the most people the best shot at earning their
success and finding enduring happiness in their work. It creates more paths
than any other system to use ones abilities in creative and meaningful
ways, from entrepreneurship to teaching to ministry to playing the French
horn. This is hardly mere materialism, and it is much more than an
economic alternative. Free enterprise is a moral imperative.
To pursue the happiness within our reach, we do best to pour ourselves
into faith, family, community and meaningful work. To share happiness, we
need to fight for free enterprise and strive to make its blessings accessible
to all.
Arthur C. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a
public policy think tank in Washington, D.C.
Source: NyTimes.com

Book Recommendation for the week
How should we live? Great ideas from the past for everyday life by
Roman Krznaric

Following is an article based on the book:
Six Life Lessons from Leo Tolstoy
It's 150 years since Leo Tolstoy put pen to paper and began writing his epic
War and Peace. While most people think of him as one of the 19th
century's greatest novelists, few are aware that he was also one of its most
radical social and political thinkers. During a long life from 1828 to 1910,
Tolstoy gradually rejected the received beliefs of his aristocratic
background and embraced a startlingly unconventional worldview that
shocked his peers. Tracing his personal transformation offers some wise
and surprising lessons for how we should approach the art of living
today.
Tolstoy was born into the Russian nobility. His family had an estate and
owned hundreds of serfs. The early life of the young count was raucous and
debauched, and he gambled away a fortune through a reckless addiction
to cards. As he acknowledged in A Confession:
I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost
at cards, consumed the labor of the peasants, sentenced them to
punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery
of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder there was no crime I did not
commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my
contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral
man. So I lived for ten years.
So how did Tolstoy manage to wean himself off this rather racy, decadent
lifestyle? And how might his journey help us rethink our own philosophies
of life?
Lesson 1: Keep an Open Mind
One area in which Tolstoy excelled was the ability and willingness to
change his mind based on new experiences. It was a skill he began
nurturing in the 1850s when he was an army officer. Tolstoy fought in the
bloody siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War, a horrific experience
that turned him from a regular soldier into a pacifist. A decisive event took
place in 1857, when he witnessed a public execution by guillotine in Paris.
He never forgot the severed head thumping into the box below. It
convinced him of the belief that the state and its laws were not only brutal,
but served to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. He wrote to a
friend, "The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to
exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens...Henceforth, I shall never serve
any government anywhere." Tolstoy was on his way to becoming an
anarchist. His criticisms of the tsarist regime in Russia became so vociferous
that only his literary fame saved him from imprisonment. Tolstoy would be
the first to encourage us to question the fundamental beliefs and dogmas
we have been brought up with.
Lesson 2: Practice Empathy
Tolstoy was one of the great empathic adventurers of the 19th century,
displaying an unusual desire to step into the shoes of people whose lives
were vastly different from his own. Following the Emancipation of the Serfs
in 1861, and influenced by a growing movement across Russia which
extolled the virtues of the peasantry, Tolstoy not only adopted traditional
peasant dress, but worked alongside the laborers on his estate, ploughing
the fields and repairing their homes with his own hands. For a blue-
blooded count, such actions were nothing short of remarkable. Although
no doubt tinged with paternalism, Tolstoy enjoyed the company of
peasants and consciously began to shun the literary and aristocratic elite in
the cities. He also founded an experimental school for peasant children
based on the libertarian and egalitarian ideas of Rousseau and Proudhon,
and even taught there himself. Unlike many of his fellow aristocrats who
claimed solidarity with rural laborers, Tolstoy believed you could never
understand the reality of their lives unless you had a taste of it yourself.
Tolstoy Ploughing (c.1889) by Ilya Repin. Tolstoy regularly put down his pen
to work in the fields. He kept a scythe and saw
leaning up against the wall next to his writing desk. A basket of cobbler's
tools lay on the floor.
Lesson 3: Make a Difference
For an upper-class literary gent, Tolstoy made a notable effort to take
practical action to alleviate other people's suffering. His dedication to the
peasantry was nowhere more evident than in his famine relief work. After
the crop failure of 1873, Tolstoy decided to stop writing Anna Karenina for
a year to organize aid for the starving, remarking to a relative, "I cannot
tear myself away from living creatures to bother about imaginary ones." His
friends and family thought it crazy that one of the finest novelists in the
world would put one of his works of genius on the backburner. But Tolstoy
was adamant. He did it again after the famine in 1891, and with other
members of his family spent the next two years raising money from around
the world and working in soup kitchens. Can you imagine a bestselling
author today setting aside their latest book to do humanitarian relief work
for two years?Can you imagine a bestselling author today setting aside
their latest book to do humanitarian relief work for two years?
Lesson 4: Master the Art of Simple Living
One of Tolstoy's greatest gifts and also a source of torment was his
addiction to the question of the meaning of life. He never ceased asking
himself why and how he should live, and what was the point of all his
money and fame. In the late 1870s, unable to find any answers, he had a
mental breakdown and was on the verge of suicide. But after immersing
himself in the German philosopher Schopenhauer, Buddhist texts, and the
Bible, he adopted a revolutionary brand of Christianity which rejected all
organized religion, including the Orthodox Church he had grown up in, and
turned toward a life of spiritual and material austerity. He gave up drinking
and smoking, and became a vegetarian. He also inspired the creation of
utopian communities for simple, self-sufficient living, where property was
held in common. These "Tolstoyan" communities spread around the world
and lead Gandhi to found an ashram in 1910 named the Tolstoy Farm.
Lesson 5: Beware Your Contradictions
Tolstoy's new, simpler life was not, however, without its struggles and
contradictions. Apart from the fact that he preached universal love yet was
constantly fighting with his wife, the apostle of equality was never able to
fully abandon his wealth and privileged lifestyle, and lived till old age in a
grand house with servants. When he mooted the idea of giving away his
estate to the peasants, his wife and children were furious, and he eventually
backed down. But in the early 1890s he managed, against their wishes, to
relinquish copyright to a huge portion of his literary works, in effect
sacrificing a fortune. In his last years, when writers and journalists came to
pay homage to the bearded sage, they were always surprised to find the
world's most famous author chopping wood with some workers or making
his own boots. Given the privileged position in which Tolstoy started life,
his personal transformation, if not complete, still deserves our admiration.
Lesson 6: Expand Your Social Circle
The most essential lesson to take from Tolstoy is to follow his lead and
recognize that the best way to challenge our assumptions and prejudices,
and develop new ways of looking at the world, is to surround ourselves
with people whose views and lifestyles differ from our own. That's why he
ceased socializing in Moscow and spent so much time with laborers on the
land. In Resurrection, Tolstoy pointed out that most people, whether they
are wealthy businessmen, powerful politicians, or common thieves,
consider their beliefs and way of life to be both admirable and ethical. "In
order to keep up their view of life," he wrote, "these people instinctively
keep to the circle of those people who share their views of life and their
own place in it."
Cosseted within our peer group or social milieu, we may think it is perfectly
normal and justifiable to own two homes, or to oppose same-sex marriage,
or to bomb countries in the Middle East. We cannot see that such views
may be perverse, unjust, or untrue because we are inside a circle of our
own making, which constantly reinforces our worldview. If we want to
question our beliefs and ideals, we need to follow the example of Tolstoy,
spending time with people whose values and everyday experiences
contrast with our own. Our task must be to journey beyond the perimeters
of the circle.

Roman Krznaric is an Australian cultural thinker and cofounder of The
School of Life in London. This post is based on his new book, How Should
We Live? Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life.

Video for the week
Socrates on Self-Confidence - Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S24FxdvfOko

Book Page for the week
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?
Phillip Toledano
source: theatlantic.com
Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for
her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August,
but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to
the Los Angeles coroners report, she lay dead for the better part of a year
before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage,
noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a
broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles
of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs,
she found Vickerss body, mummified, near a heater that was still running.
Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.
The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined Mummified Body of
Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon
Home, which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technoratis count,
Vickerss lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook
posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of
Hollywoods capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways;
now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear
of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she
did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and
no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly
woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los
Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickerss phone bills for clues
about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque
death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans
who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.

Vickerss web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has
happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have
been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more
accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a
world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In
2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid
between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock
Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this
world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time
or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been
more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever
more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We
live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the
lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the
drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.
At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook,
with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. The company
hopes to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering later this spring, which
will make it by far the largest Internet IPO in history. Some recent estimates
put the companys potential value at $100 billion, which would make it
larger than the global coffee industryone addiction preparing to surpass
the other. Facebooks scale and reach are hard to comprehend: last
summer, Facebook became, by some counts, the first Web site to receive 1
trillion page views in a month. In the last three months of 2011, users
generated an average of 2.7 billion likes and comments every day. On
whatever scale you care to judge Facebookas a company, as a culture, as
a countryit is vast beyond imagination.
Despite its immense popularity, or more likely because of it, Facebook has,
from the beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The
depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with
symptoms of Aspergers syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt
true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. The films most indelible scene, the
one that may well have earned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an
anomic Zuckerberg sending out a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, then
wai ti ng and cl i cki ng and wai ti ng and cl i cki nga moment of
superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that
scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.
When you sign up for Google+ and set up your Friends circle, the program
specifies that you should include only your real friends, the ones you feel
comfortable sharing private details with. That one little phrase, Your real
friendsso quaint, so charmingly motheringperfectly encapsulates the
anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is
interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making
us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very
isolation it seemed designed to conquer.
Facebook arrived in the middle of a dramatic increase in the quantity and
intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the sites promise of
greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary
than ever before. In 1950, less than 10 percent of American households
contained only one person. By 2010, nearly 27 percent of households had
just one person. Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of
course. In his recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric
Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, writes: Reams of published research
show that its the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best
predicts loneliness. True. But before we begin the fantasies of happily
eccentric singledom, of divorces dropping by their knitting circles after
work for glasses of Drew Barrymore pinot grigio, or recent college
graduates with perfectly articulated, Steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot
apartments organizing croquet matches with their book clubs, we should
recognize that it is not just isolation that is rising sharply. Its loneliness, too.
And loneliness makes us miserable.
We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing.
Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know,
thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a
matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of
data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency
toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other
psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety.
Still, loneliness is slippery, a difficult state to define or diagnose. The best
tool yet developed for measuring the condition is the UCLA Loneliness
Scale, a series of 20 questions that all begin with this formulation: How
often do you feel ? As in: How often do you feel that you are in tune
with the people around you? And: How often do you feel that you lack
companionship? Measuring the condition in these terms, various studies
have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent
history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45
were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a
decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the
subject, roughly 20 percent of Americansabout 60 million peopleare
unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world,
physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of
loneliness.
The new studies on loneliness are beginning to yield some surprising
preliminary findings about its mechanisms. Almost every factor that one
might assume affects loneliness does so only some of the time, and only
under certain circumstances. People who are married are less lonely than
single people, one journal article suggests, but only if their spouses are
confidants. If ones spouse is not a confidant, marriage may not decrease
loneliness. A belief in God might help, or it might not, as a 1990 German
study comparing levels of religious feeling and levels of loneliness
discovered. Active believers who saw God as abstract and helpful rather
than as a wrathful, immediate presence were less lonely. The mere belief
in God, the researchers concluded, was relatively independent of
loneliness.
But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are
not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We
gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less
easy. The decrease in confidantsthat is, in quality social connectionshas
been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of
networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to
2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had
no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they
had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to,
and 20 percent had only one confidant.

In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of
replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald
Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late
40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000
social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of
2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social
workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family
therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse
counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The
majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This
raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular
problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.
We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal
breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed
into an issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health.
If youre lonely, youre more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier
age than a similar person who isnt lonely. Youre less likely to exercise.
Youre more likely to be obese. Youre less likely to survive a serious
operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater
risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be
depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive
decline. Loneliness may not have killed Yvette Vickers, but it has been
linked to a greater probability of having the kind of heart condition that did
kill her.
And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the
first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money,
you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a
McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car.
Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national
appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly
abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their
right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it
as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a
seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of
pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is
more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-
reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing
to pay that price.
Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its
celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family
and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The
great American poem is Whitmans Song of Myself. The great American
essay is Emersons Self-Reliance. The great American novel is Melvilles
Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is
incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is
about self-expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
called individualism the great watchword of American life.
Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for
isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in
communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting
spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials,
in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarityas do the McCarthy
hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the
porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauers Studies in Pessimismthe
ones who huddle together for warmth and shuffle away in pain, always
separating and congregating.
We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000
book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war
decline of social capitalthe strength and value of interpersonal networks
to numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl,
televisions dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby
Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family. The trends he
observed continued through the prosperity of the aughts, and have only
become more pronounced with time: the rate of union membership
declined in 2011, again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks
continued their slide into irrelevance. We are lonely because we want to be
lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.
The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part
of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-
away in pain?
Well before Facebook, digital technology was enabling our tendency for
isolation, to an unprecedented degree. Back in the 1990s, scholars started
calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and
a lack of human contact the Internet paradox. A prominent 1998 article
on the phenomenon by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed
that increased Internet usage was already coinciding with increased
loneliness. Critics of the study pointed out that the two groups that
participated in the studyhigh-school journalism students who were
heading to university and socially active members of community-
development boardswere statistically likely to become lonelier over time.
Which brings us to a more fundamental question: Does the Internet make
people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?
The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of
Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled
Who Uses Facebook?, found a complex and sometimes confounding
relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had
slightly lower levels of social lonelinessthe sense of not feeling bonded
with friendsbut significantly higher levels of family lonelinessthe
sense of not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook
encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the
expense of our family relationshipsor it may be that people who have
unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through
other means, including Facebook. The researchers also found that lonely
people are inclined to spend more time on Facebook: One of the most
noteworthy findings, they wrote, was the tendency for neurotic and
lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day
than non-lonely individuals. And they found that neurotics are more likely
to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in
addition to the wall.
Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer
Institute at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200
Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step
outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects
of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes that the
effect of Facebook depends on what you bring to it. Just as your mother
said: you get out only what you put in. If you use Facebook to
communicate directly with other individualsby using the like button,
commenting on friends posts, and so onit can increase your social
capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls composed
communication, are more satisfying than one-click communicationthe
lazy click of a like. People who received composed communication
became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication
experienced no change in loneliness, Burke tells me. So, you should
inform your friend in writing how charming her son looks with Harry Potter
cake smeared all over his face, and how interesting her sepia-toned
photograph of that tree-framed bit of skyline is, and how cool it is that
shes at whatever concert she happens to be at. Thats what we all want to
hear. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-
public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the
other people who may be listening in. People whose friends write to them
semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness, Burke says.
On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebookscanning your
friends status updates and updating the world on your own activities via
your wall, or what Burke calls passive consumption and broadcasting
correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. Its a lonely business, wandering
the labyrinths of our friends and pseudo-friends projected identities,
trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will
listen, and what they will hear. According to Burke, passive consumption of
Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression. If two
women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them
spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one
reading tends to grow slightly more depressed, Burke says. Her
conclusion suggests that my sometimes unhappy reactions to Facebook
may be more universal than I had realized. When I scroll through page after
page of my friends descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids
are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how theyre all
about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic
produce bought at the farmers market and then go for a jog and maybe
check in at the office because theyre so busy getting ready to hop on a
plane for a week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more
miserable. A lot of other people doing the same thing feel a little bit
worse, too.
Still, Burkes research does not support the assertion that Facebook creates
loneliness. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely
away from Facebook, too, she points out; on Facebook, as everywhere
else, correlation is not causation. The popular kids are popular, and the
lonely skulkers skulk alone. Perhaps it says something about me that I think
Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking. I mention to Burke the
widely reported study, conducted by a Stanford graduate student, that
showed how believing that others have strong social networks can lead to
feelings of depression. What does Facebook communicate, if not the
impression of social bounty? Everybody else looks so happy on Facebook,
with so many friends, that our own social networks feel emptier than ever
in comparison. Doesnt that make people feel lonely? If people are
reading about lives that are much better than theirs, two things can
happen, Burke tells me. They can feel worse about themselves, or they
can feel motivated.
Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year.
John Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social
Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the worlds leading expert on
loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, released in 2008, he revealed
just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic
functions of human physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the
stress hormone, in the morning urine of lonely people. Loneliness burrows
deep: When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their
white cells, he writes, we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the
deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.
Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA
transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely.
To Cacioppo, Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. Forming
connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by
an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need, he writes.
But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real
thing. The real thing being actual people, in the flesh. When I speak to
Cacioppo, he is refreshingly clear on what he sees as Facebooks effect on
society. Yes, he allows, some research has suggested that the greater the
number of Facebook friends a person has, the less lonely she is. But he
argues that the impression this creates can be misleading. For the most
part, he says, people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of
loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook. The idea that a Web site could
deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of ones
social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of ones
social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social
media doesnt create new social networks; it just transfers established
networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook
doesnt destroy friendshipsbut it doesnt create them, either.
In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the
loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via
Facebook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face
contact. The results were unequivocal. The greater the proportion of face-
to-face interactions, the less lonely you are, he says. The greater the
proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are. Surely, I suggest to
Cacioppo, this means that Facebook and the like inevitably make people
lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool,
its effectiveness will depend on its user. If you use Facebook to increase
face-to-face contact, he says, it increases social capital. So if social
media let you organize a game of football among your friends, thats
healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however,
thats unhealthy.
Facebook can be terrific, if we use it properly, Cacioppo continues. Its
like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone.
But hasnt the car increased loneliness? If cars created the suburbs, surely
they also created isolation. Thats because of how we use cars, Cacioppo
replies. How we use these technologies can lead to more integration,
rather than more isolation.
The problem, then, is that we invite loneliness, even though it makes us
miserable. The history of our use of technology is a history of isolation
desired and achieved. When the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company
opened its A&P stores, giving Americans self-service access to groceries,
customers stopped having relationships with their grocers. When the
telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors doors.
Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships.
Researchers at the HP Social Computing Lab who studied the nature of
peoples connections on Twitter came to a depressing, if not surprising,
conclusion: Most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless
from an interaction point of view. I have to wonder: What other point of
view is meaningful?
Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the
lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves.
Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our
actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our
machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery
store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being
or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine. Its
faster and more efficient, I tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not
having to wait with the other customers who are lined up alongside the
conveyor belt: the hipster mom who disapproves of my high-carbon-
footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the point of tears while she
waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine will accept or decline;
the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience that I dont
possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up the
groceries myself.
Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial
connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess
of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its
power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing
reality of societythe accidental revelations we make at parties, the
awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general
gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness
of a seemingly social machine. Everythings so simple: status updates,
pictures, your wall.

But the price of this smooth sociability is a constant compulsion to assert
ones own happiness, ones own fulfillment. Not only must we contend with
the social bounty of others; we must foster the appearance of our own
social bounty. Being happy all the time, pretending to be happy, actually
attempting to be happyits exhausting. Last year a team of researchers
led by Iris Mauss at the University of Denver published a study looking into
the paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Most goals in life show a
direct correlation between valuation and achievement. Studies have found,
for example, that students who value good grades tend to have higher
grades than those who dont value them. Happiness is an exception. The
study came to a disturbing conclusion:
Valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact,
under certain conditions, the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but
not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were
their hedonic balance, psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, and
the higher their depression symptoms.
The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made
roughly the same point.
Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our
digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and
personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and
privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company. Two of
the most compelling critics of Facebookneither of them a Luddite
concentrate on exactly this point. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a
Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of
where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: I fear
that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I
worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process. Lanier
argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and
this, to his mind, is the sites crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.
Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT who in 1995
published the digital-positive analysis Life on the Screen, is much more
skeptical about the effects of online society in her 2011 book, Alone
Together: These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about
intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect
ourselves from them at the same time. The problem with digital intimacy
is that it is ultimately incomplete: The ties we form through the Internet
are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy,
she writes. We dont want to intrude on each other, so instead we
constantly intrude on each other, but not in real time.
Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on
Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony
nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. (Look how
casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300
photos!) Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7
occupation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Australian study Who Uses
Facebook? found a significant correlation between Facebook use and
narcissism: Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism,
exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers, the studys authors
wrote. In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the
narcissistic individuals need to engage in self-promoting and superficial
behavior.

Rising narcissism isnt so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends.
In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric
profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic
personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that
narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for
attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American
respondents were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of
narcissistic personality disorder. Among people older than 65, 3 percent
reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly
10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16 Americans has experienced
some symptoms of NPD. And loneliness and narcissism are intimately
connected: a longitudinal study of Swedish women demonstrated a strong
link between levels of narcissism in youth and levels of loneliness in old
age. The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness,
and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other
people.
A considerable part of Facebooks appeal stems from its miraculous fusion
of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of
intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-
image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook
is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite
for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude.
The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the
lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary
stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebooks
isolation is a grind. Whats truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its
volume750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekendbut
the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users
and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook userlog on every day.
Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after
waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The
relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook
never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always
created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every
morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee. Yvette Vickerss computer
was on when she died.
Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be
pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the
new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us,
obscures what isnt being served: everything that matters. What Facebook
has revealed about human natureand this is not a minor revelationis
that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and
total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a
more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-
reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we
are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook
denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance
to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.
Stephen Marche, a novelist, writes a monthly column for Esquire. Naturally,
you can friend him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.

Climbing Mount Immortality: Death, Cognition and the Making
of Civilization
By Michael Shermer
Image: Illustration by Mark Jarman
Imagine yourself dead. What picture comes to mind? Your funeral with a
casket surrounded by family and friends? Complete darkness and void? In
either case, you are still conscious and observing the scene. In reality, you
can no more envision what it is like to be dead than you can visualize
yourself before you were born. Death is cognitively nonexistent, and yet we
know it is real because every one of the 100 billion people who lived
before us is gone. As Christopher Hitchens told an audience I was in shortly
before his death, Im dying, but so are all of you. Reality check.
In his book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives
Civilization (Crown, 2012), British philosopher and Financial Times essayist
Stephen Cave calls this the Mortality Paradox. Death therefore presents
itself as both inevitable and impossible, Cave suggests. We see it all
around us, and yet it involves the end of consciousness, and we cannot
consciously simulate what it is like to not be conscious.
The attempt to resolve the paradox has led to four immortality narratives:
Staying alive: Like all living systems, we strive to avoid death. The dream
of doing so foreverphysically, in this worldis the most basic of
immortality narratives. Resurrection: The belief that, although we must
physically die, nonetheless we can physically rise again with the bodies we
knew in life. Soul: The dream of surviving as some kind of spiritual
entity. Legacy: More indirect ways of extending ourselves into the
future such as glory, reputation, historical impact or children.
All four fail to deliver everlasting life. Science is nowhere near
reengineering the body to stay alive beyond 120 years. Both religious and
scientific forms of resurrecting your body succumb to the Transformation
Problem (how could you be reassembled just as you were and yet this time
be invulnerable to disease and death?) and the Duplication Problem (how
would duplicates be different from twins?). Even if DigiGod made a
perfect copy of you at the end of time, Case conjectures, it would be
exactly that: a copy, an entirely new person who just happened to have the
same memories and beliefs as you. The soul hypothesis has been slain by
neuroscience showing that the mind (consciousness, memory and
personality patterns representing you) cannot exist without the brain.
When the brain dies of injury, stroke, dementia or Alzheimers, the mind
dies with it. No brain, no mind; no body, no soul.

That leaves us with the legacy narrative, of which Woody Allen quipped: "I
dont want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it by
not dying." Nevertheless, Cave argues that legacy is the driving force
behind works of art, music, literature, science, culture, architecture and
other artifacts of civilization. How? Because of something called Terror
Management Theory. Awareness of ones mortality focuses the mind to
create and produce to avoid the terror that comes from confronting the
mortality paradox that would otherwise, in the words of the theorys
proponentspsychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom
Pyszczynskireduce people to twitching blobs of biological protoplasm
completely perfused with anxiety and unable to effectively respond to the
demands of their immediate surroundings.
Maybe, but human behavior is multivariate in causality, and fear of death is
only one of many drivers of creativity and productivity. A baser evolutionary
driver is sexual selection, in which organisms from bowerbirds to brainy
bohemians engage in the creative production of magnificent works with
the express purpose of attracting matesfrom big blue bowerbird nests to
big-brained orchestral music, epic poems, stirring literature and even
scientific discoveries. As well argued by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey
Miller in The Mating Mind (Anchor, 2001), those that do so most effectively
leave behind more offspring and thus pass on their creative genes to future
generations. As Hitchens once told me, mastering the pen and the podium
means never having to dine or sleep alone.
Given the improbability of the first three immortality narratives, making a
difference in the world in the form of a legacy that changes lives for the
better is the highest we can climb up Mount Immortality, but on a clear day
you can see forever.

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Weekly Read Compilation December 15, 2013

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