Hungarian literature

As much as I adore and cherish literature, and among many others, Hungarian literature, this great site has so far managed to fly under my radar:

http://www.hlo.hu/index.php

(The fact that it did so is more of an indication of the crudeness of my radar systems, and lack of time to read as much literature as I would like, than of anything else.)

Male and female brains - what do differences show

Finally, journalists have picked up on what I have earlier complained about: the total misinterpretation of data about brain structure and functioning.

Cordelia Fine wrote a short article, exposing the main problems well, citing much of the data and highlighting where the interpretations go wrong.

Robin McKie, science editor at The Guardian, also wrote a short summary about why certain interpretations of data are debated by scientists.

I was also happy to see that Rae Langton and John Dupré wrote a very much to-the-point letter on the issue.

And Susan Moore contributed an ironic, mocking piece. Makes a good addition - and I think in this case the harsher voice is absolutely justified.

What was really sad to see were the reactions in the comments: most people see such criticism as being equal with science bashing. I suppose these are people who never did research and cannot see the difference between a debate about a scientific question (how to interpret data) and a political question (should we rely on science in decision making? etc.). The participants in this debate are all engaged in trying to help get the best interpretation of the data. They don't have any problems with studying the brain, etc. But of course just by looking at data from tests you cannot make any inferences and draw any sort of conclusion.

A short follow up on Cameron in China

The BBC, naturally, covers David Cameron's trip. Cameron mainly came out with visions about great economic success resulting from closer UK-China cooperation. Read here. It is a fair bit of reporting, but if you look at the comments chosen to be displayed on top a funny picture emerges: only comments cautiously and 'cleverly' calling attention to the importance of economic development and the need for larger scale access to Chinese markets are displayed. No critical comments, no condemning comments. It is hard to believe there weren't at least a few reasonable ones.

The Independent also has a short cover on the trip. It sticks to the facts and what the politicians said, but there is an interesting small bit at the very end of the news: "Chinese government spending on medical services accounts for only 2.7 per cent of GDP, compared with 8.4 per cent in the UK, and Beijing has made increasing health spending a priority."

Take into account what the 2.7 per cent of the GDP can cover in a country which has a fragment of the established infrastructure needed to provide normal health care services. Bad roads, bad public traffic, not enough doctors and hospitals, expensive treatments. Not the type of policy we should advocate or look away from, if that serves our short-term interests.

Cakes and sweets for kumquats

Most of my entries are critical and morose. But some good things manage to cheer me up: yesterday my boss surprised us by bringing an absolutely fantastic self-baked carrot cake to work and sharing it with all of us. It was so far the best carrot cake I had in England.

Also, while looking around today I found that the most popular blogging kumquat seems to be a connoisseur of sweets! What a pleasant likeness. 

Check out all the great pictures and nice recipes: http://www.kumquatblog.com/ 

From the banal to the sensational...and back: brain science misinterpreted

Neurology is amazing: it enables serious scientists to study the brain and its interconnections with other bodily units, the external world, its internal connections. In turn they can use this data to understand how certain disorders, diseases, and injuries affect our main neural center. These results can then be used to help create treatments, medicine, etc.

But sometimes journalists overlook the obvious and think findings about the brain also give us some important insight, some explanations of why we are the way we are as persons. And when they do this they put the cart before the horse. (Note: scientists also do this occasionally.)

See this latest piece of scientific journalism: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differently?CMP=fb_us

One cannot help but think of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal's excellent comic on such cases. 

The main idea presented as a great new finding is that the average female and male brain are wired in different ways, with male brains exhibiting more connections and more activity in parts usually responsible for coordination and perception, and higher modularity, whereas on average female brains exhibit more connections and activity in parts usually responsible for social skills and memory. 

The clever scientist - Ragini Verma - then goes on and makes a claim reaching the level of a first-year Introduction to Anthropology class: "If you look at functional studies, the left of the brain is more for logical thinking, the right of the brain is for more intuitive thinking. So if there's a task that involves doing both of those things, it would seem that women are hardwired to do those better," Verma said. Don't get me wrong: Verma seems to be clever and I respect their results about the differences. It is just the inferences she and her team makes based on these particular results that I debate.

There are three major problems with all this:

1. It is not any big news that there are differences in average activity patterns in male and female brains. There were many earlier experiments (not targeted usually at this difference for its own sake) that indicated this (remember for example Baron-Cohen's work on Autism).

2. That the brain can be easily divided into a logical and an intuitive half is only true if you use very confused, ambiguous notions of logic, intuition, and emotion. People doing serious work on theoretical or practical reasoning, on belief formation, on emotions, or on plan formation all know that there are many-many systematic rules involved in all of these processes and activities. It is not the case, as laymen usually suppose, that emotional reactions are unsystematic. It is also not the case that you can think 'anything', or that the decisions which you make aren't regulated by several steps of filtering in different pieces of information (perceptual inputs, preferences, risk assessments, etc.). Strictly speaking, there is nothing unreasonable or irrational going on in these processes.

How can we then make distinctions between them? Based on their functions. Where do we get the labels for the functions and the ideas for how they work? From everyday, folk psychology. And if you carve up your brain based on which parts realize these functions you will end up with a picture of the brain as doing exactly what people thought it is doing. ("Oh my god, it really is thinking!") This leads us on to my last point.

3. If you use folk scientific concepts to identify brain activities you have zero reason to be surprised when you discover that woman and man are like what we think woman and man are. Why so? Because our everyday views are largely correct (largely means that on average they can be applied successfully more than with bad results). That they are correct does not show that they are natural, or that it is good that things are this way. Feminists think it isn't, and they seem to have good reasons for this. Also, it does not mean that from women exhibiting more emotional reactions it follows that their decision making is more influenced by emotions than men's. This is an inference not warranted by the thesis that more emotional reactions can be observed in female behavior.

"So what," you might say "the results are still interesting". After all our stereotypes are confirmed. Maybe we are right and man and women are just naturally different exactly in the ways in which our second-half of the twentieth century stereotypes suggested. The experiment was done on young people (between 8-22 years old) so you could think cultural influences cannot have a very significant effect at that age.

Not so fast. This concept of 'natural' is highly problematic. The way we lead our lives nowadays is in no sense like what it was when our body (including our brain) reached its current level of evolution (of course evolution is going on, but not much changes in evolutionarily short times, like a couple of thousands of years). So, what our brain functions show isn't behavior that is natural in evolutionary terms, since we do not live according to our most basic behavioral patterns that were successful two-, five- or ten-thousand years ago. They show what was successful in the past, in very different environments and for very different lives. Surely no one advocated that just because some of the major evolutionary changes took place in our brains a few thousands (or tens of thousands of years ago) we should live the way we lived then.

The other thing is the studied age: by the age of 8, culture weighs in massively in the behavior and development of people. Many people working on child development show that after 5 the personality is pretty much in place. Studies about implicit gender bias show that at 5-6 years of age children are already affected by gender role stereotypes. So, the functional differences can be in part the sign of very flexible young brains working in different ways when exhibiting behavior appropriate to the different gender roles according to which they have developed. The functional areas responsible for certain ways of thinking and behaving in girls who follow the gender-roles adapted by them will be more developed than in males who follow male gender-roles and hence engage in different behavior systematically. And this is not a big finding. Anyone worth her wits could have told you this is what you will see at the end of the study. (How much money and time did we put into this research? Which useless research areas are the most expensive? Where should we make cuts?)

Of course the objection and the last question is not entirely fair. We still need lots of data about the brain in order to better understand its working. Therefore such a big scale study is useful in the sense that it gathered much interesting information that can be put to good use in research aimed at healing and therapy. It is only useless if you try to make it work as an explanation of behavior based on gender.

Note: I'm not saying there are no differences between males and females within the human species with a biological basis, or that all stereotypically female values are bad, or that there might be in a society specifically female or male values, or that all traditional gender-role based identities are evil. The claim I'm making is only this: if you look at how the brains of young people work on the level involved in most of their everyday activities (higher order functions and perceptual functions) very likely you will find exactly the differences that underlie the lifestyles and roles expected from them.

The authors of the study say: "Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes." Well, the study does not show this. But it shows that female and male brains are so adaptive that they can easily work in the ways required to lead to behavior conforming to gender roles, boys will do more sports which will develop the coordination related areas more and girl will engage in more small talk and playing directed at emotional understanding. And the realizers of different behavior are different brain activities. I would bet that the same study in 20 years would show different results, if gender roles get less entrenched.

On David Cameron's visit to China

It seems that in moments of international political difficulties British Prime Ministers have a knack for licking the wrong ass. This time David Cameron has shown us beautifully how he can go bone deep with his tongue between the ass-cheeks of Chinese leaders, retaining a broad smile on his face, sending messages from his twitter account "This is awesome! And if I succeed you all will be able to experience it soon too!"

It is understandable that he felt at ease in China: after all he is a busy man and it may have escaped him that just this week China pressed for a unilateral extension of its military zone, pushing it forward straight into Japanese territory. Great move mister Cameron! 

Quoting the great man (via this article): 

"We should be clear that there is a genuine choice for every country over how to respond to this growing openness and success. They can choose to see China's rise as a threat or an opportunity. They can protect their markets from China or open their markets to China. They can try and shut China out – or welcome China as a partner at the top table of global affairs." [Italics added by me.]

Lovely ideas! When another agent threatens to step into the line of global bullies, extending its  military control zone, trying to get foreign territories under its control, increasing its military spending, firmly rejecting values that are at the core of every decent European's value system, this is a truly nice time to emphasize the importance of being open to China. Note: he didn't emphasize being open to Chinese culture, not to judge every Chinese person based on the acts of their government, etc. No. Just accept the government. Get over the torture, no free press, and forced labour issues. China, a country whose government got furious with above mentioned PM just a year ago for even meeting someone they don't like. Bravo.

Good old Neville Chamberlain would applaud! Just recall him at his best:

"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel that has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war."

Sure. Why take sides in a conflict which partially our politics brought about? Or this other gem:

"My good friends, this is the second time there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Now I recommend you go home, and sleep quietly in your beds."

What insight. Such clever. At the same time Cameron is the strong man at home, balking at the evil immigrants, preaching austerity. The Telegraph, almost humbled by the chance of getting an insight into the terrible experiences such a great man has to endure day-by-day in the country he leads, reports that Cameron visited a factory where 10 out of 40 of the workers were from abroad. This is a car factory. Being the sharp chap that he is, Cameron blames British education: of course, after all if the English don't want to do skilled manual work because they can get better jobs you still should not give those jobs to people from poorer countries. Or does the reasoning go this way: capitalism and competition should apply everywhere, except maybe in England? In any case, bloody wonderful. Let's totally disregard that most people who come here seeking work aren't the ones with good diplomas getting the high salary jobs. They are the people who fuel your car, prepare your sandwich and clean the toilet after you. Not all, but most of them.

Such moves as patting China on the back, and topping that with an offer of a massage, show that Cameron clearly doesn't take the EU seriously, doesn't take its strong political and economic connections with Japan seriously, and has given in to the idea that since the UK cannot do much in military terms about that part of the world, they should just reap as much as they can via the usual way: getting in their companies.

At the same time, a fact that here in England is not too often mentioned: while they spend big money yearly on supporting the less-developed EU member countries, they also enjoy huge benefits from total free trade. Many UK companies got tremendous tax exemptions in Central- and East-Europe. They can also go on paying minimum wages and relying on non-fixed term contracts, firing employees after a few months. The profits are extraordinary and the bulk of it flows back to the mother companies on the Island. If Westminster cannot step up and stop those companies from taking and hiding the money in some remote offshore accounts, that's not the fault of the usurped countries. That's the fault of the inefficiency of his own government.

I can only hope he has shaved before going to meet the Chinese PM. Just so that his stubbly doesn't hurt the tender skin on the lower-back cheeks of his new 'economic partner'.

No intervention

It seems like a strange thought that the government shouldn't interfere and intervene in the business world. After all the government is pretty much what represents people and the most effective, powerful organizations that's supposed to enforce common interest.

Saying that the economy will sort itself out, seems to be a bit like saying:

"Don't touch the economy, because the economy is magic!"

Why would any system suddenly produce good outcomes for most people? And if it does not, why should our most costly defense system not be allowed to regulate it?

Bacon and Moore at the Ashmolean

I finally found the time to visit the Francis Bacon-Henry Moore exhibition at the Ashmolean. And it was well worth it!

As most temporary exhibitions at the Ashmolean this one is also small: it takes up only three rooms. Therefore it is very important that the selection of works be really good. Also, there is no space to present a lot of context, a very detailed story of the development. But the curators (Martin Harrison and Richard Calvocoressi) have done a good work and selected pieces both by Bacon and by Moore which highlight the major influences on them, connect their work to each other, and illustrate their major themes.

Of course besides fulfilling the above mentioned educational end aesthetic duties the exhibition offers more. In fact, it was a very strange and very personal experience. For some time I was appalled by Bacon's figures.Their grotesque movements, positions, the distorted faces, the flesh and bones made visible...I enjoyed the sensitivity and honesty of these works in a dark way. As statements about humans, as showing equally ferocious and ugly truths hiding below our skins. But today another aspect of Bacon's work struck me. It is the honesty of it. The figures stopped being threatening, although some of the pictures create the illusion that one has just stepped into a room where one is struck by the sight of these people doing there whatever they are doing. From threatening it went into compassionate. It appears now to me that what makes it hard to endure Bacon's works is the need it presents for opening up towards the vulnerability, the need for support and understanding that radiates from these figures.

Francis Bacon Second version of Triptych 1944 (1988, oil on canvas)

What appeared to be hostile monsters in the Second version of Triptych 1944 I suddenly saw as lungs, intestines, throats and mouths grown together in desperate, exposed positions. Why are they there? Who did this to them? Why is it happening? The focus shifted from the feeling of 'what is going to happen to me if I'm left alone with these beings?' to one of 'why would anyone do that to others?'

As I already mentioned, the exhibition created an exhibition that emphasizes important similarities between Bacon's and Moore's work. Some of Moore's statues almost call out for a gentle touch, or seem to suggest that their characters are already entrapped in a situation that is beyond help... In this way they make the onlooker feel powerless and lost, recreating the effect of those maddening situations when one's beloveds or friends need help and one cannot provide it.

I won't go on any longer about my experiences and what the works evoked in me. I suggest to everyone who can to go and see for themselves, and bring home a touching and humbling experience.

In case you are looking for a bit of introduction to their work, this interview with Bacon, and this short film about Moore (featuring himself, and showing how he handles the chisel) might be nice places to start.

Henry Moore Three Standing Figures (London, Battersea Park)

Bullshit worries about 'bullshit' jobs

David Graeber is one of those folks who do not help much to better the reputation of Anthropology, or tenured professors. His article 'On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs' went viral on the internet and every week a couple of my friends put it on their wall as if it would help them achieve some sort of revelation. 'Oh my, I might work in a bullshit job!' 'Wow, we would be so much better off if we wouldn't do all these jobs!' I can imagine them thinking stuff like this. But I cannot imagine that they actually spend one more minute thinking because then they would just close the tab with Graeber's article, blush because at first impulse they agreed with it, and then forget about it.

So, what's wrong with the claims of the article?

On bullshit jobs: Graeber claims that many service sector jobs (including admin jobs, but he also mentions jobs in transportation, PR, health admin, fast food restaurants, etc.) are meaningless, and the people who have to do these jobs are the worse off for this. They do not gain self-respect or self-fulfillment from working in these roles.

That's one of those 'oh, in the past everything was better (big sigh)' type of claims which do not make sense. When were masses of people employed in easy jobs which afforded them a living? In the middle ages? Clearly not. In the Roman Empire? Not really. During the Industrial Revolution? All those happy people toiling in the factories and mines? Or the ones sent off to the colonies? The proud ones in forced labor? In the early twentieth century? And why would everyone find a fulfilling job? If no one cares for sewage and cleaning will we be better off? A happier society with no butchers, because it is kind of hard and sometimes disgusting? Not to mention the early starts!

Graeber also laments the loss of jobs where people do 'real work'. It is true that it often causes problems if a skilled worker is replaced by a machine on the production line. But this is also more complicated than just the personal tragedy of that single individual. Probably the machine is more productive. Hence the company can make more profit. And then it can pay more taxes. And that goes back to public services. Also, people with only one skill-set were never in an easier situation. It was the false promise of the WWII enthusiasm and economic boom when people thought that they will have secure jobs 'til the end of their lives. But that was during the economic upheaval following the war. Not before that, not after that. And not in general terms: one of the reasons for it was that the colonies were still mostly under European control, so, they could pay for much of the losses of the European societies. So, if you do not just concentrate on your own neighborhood, you can easily see that this kind of comfort has a high price.

On the uselessness of service jobs: Graeber is one of those guys who didn't get economics 101. When you are thinking of what you pay for it is not only the material and the product that is involved. No one is - and shouldn't be - doing work for free. People's effort and time isn't for free. If someone prepares your food, walks your dogs, takes care of your kids, prepares your taxes, etc. that person is saving you time. The trick is to make good bargains: try to get the money you need to pay them in such a way as to be better off. If you can save 2 hours of work by getting your meals done, while you can pay for this with money you earn in an hour and a half you are better off. You can earn more in that half an hour, or even better, relax, be with your family, kids, walk your dog, read a good book, visit your parents.

Add to this that someone with good skills can probably earn more per hour - say an engineer - than someone without good skills. So, why would this person spend his or her time preparing food every day for a long time if he can in that same time earn more and thereby 1. she/he can pay someone else who doesn't have skills which are in demand, thereby helping that person earn a living, 2. provide better for her/his family and community, and self. So much about the loss of 'real jobs'.

Then take the rants about administration. People are shocked how there are more and more admin people about. Funnily, they always forget to mention that there are also way more people around, living for a longer time, being in better health (due in large part to well organized and accessible health services), enjoying more and more services. To coordinate all this demands larger admins, and yes, not proportionately larger ones, but exponentially larger ones. Why is that so? First, because the same amount of humans can create more data and do more types of things, have more demands, if they work more effectively. Which is just what technology enables us to do. Also, it enables us to enjoy our free time in many-many more ways then we used to. We get everywhere quicker, can communicate and therefore make decisions quicker, calculate and solve problems quicker, plan quicker, run experiments quicker. Maybe these things aren't easy to recognize for someone being as far from the competitive public sector as possible, but it is still so. These exponential growths in demands, opportunities, work output call for larger admin bodies to run well.

Graeber doesn't cite any statistics or any data confirming that bigger administrative structure makes things run less effectively. What does the decreased effectiveness then consists it? That he himself has to fill out more papers at work? Well, that's life: whereas earlier we used to have privileged positions in society where you weren't really accountable, that is not so anymore. Not as bad as you would think, at least not for the people who pay you, and the ones who you are supposed to serve.

Or that administration is boring? Sure it is. But nobody said it would be easy to live nowadays in a highly developed industrialized society. At least, not that easy that you have only to do what you enjoy and find fulfilling, and even that activity only for as long as you like to do it.

Stoic week!

Look, look! A wonderful idea, and a fun one to. Especially to people who are interested in practical uses of life-philosophies. Handbook, measurements, exercises. Have a great experience and try it out for a week what it is like to be a stoic.

Application and more info here: http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/stoicismtoday/stoic-week-2013/