Why Steven Pinker is So Annoying

Steven Pinker considers himself a progressive and seems irritated that many progressives consider him The World's Most Annoying Man. I have long counted myself in the latter camp. Still, this reaction is mostly a feeling, and I've had to spend some time thinking about my feelings before I can articulate why. Why is it that a seemingly "nice" man who insists upon "reason" and "data" and, I'll admit, facts, to illustrate that right now is the best of the time in human history, induces a feeling of contempt and disgust. 

The facts he iterates and reiterates is that, worldwide, armed conflicts and violent deaths and abject poverty are down, while life expectancy and the number of people in middle-class are up. The data no doubt accept these conclusions. What is unclear, however, is what he is fighting against. Who is his opponent? He vaguely points to the "general feeling of doom" or all the bad news in media. It smells fishy and disingenuous, especially when he is trying so hard to be slippery. 

Some faceless person: There is a global pandemic going on and US rate of excess death this year is up 20% over last year. (True)

Pinker: But deaths from war and famine and infectious diseases are lower than ever. (Also true)

When he is trying to argue optimism into everyone's head, I am reminded of Ned Flanders in The Simpsons. 

Where does this argument go wrong though? It is not easy to immediately pinpoint. 

Recently a horrendous incident made the rounds on Chinese internet. A good-looking young Tibetan woman living in Sichuan Province, 拉姆, was murdered by her husband. Her tragedy caused widespread outrage because it is a perfect example of how the society has failed her. Married at 19, her husband physically abused her. She bore two children, including a son, as her husband wanted, but the beating did not stop. She divorced him, and the court gave her husband full custody of both children. Having lost everything, the woman made a relatively good living with dignity and enormous hard work. Thanks to social media, she also became a 网红, an internet celebrity who gained thousands of fans who watched her webcast. Many have pointed out that she was the "perfect victim", ie, a "pure" victim, because she did nothing to "contribute" to her demise, as most other victims of domestic abuse are accused of. But being perfect was not enough to save her life. Her ex-husband poured gasoline on her and burned her to death. 

If presented with this incident and the public's reaction, I am sure Mr. Pinker would point out that, overall, women's economic and social conditions in 2020 are better than those in 1920 or 1820, and fewer women, or Chinese women, or rural Chinese women are suffering abuse by their husbands, families, and society. And he would be correct. So why does such a position seem disgusting, at least to me? 

Both correct and repulsive. It's a feeling worth examination. 

To this victim of her ex-husband, the local police who refused to protect her, a court that took away her children, and an utterly indifferent society, the argument of progress is irrelevant. In the long run the world indeed becomes better (maybe? depending on how long?), but, as Keynes pointed out, "In the long run we are all dead."

Philosophers and sociologists often debate about the good of an individual versus the good of many, but they have rarely discussed the pain of an individual versus the pain of many. Perhaps, instinctively, everyone knows that the pain of a single person can never be understood through the pain of many. There may be a thing of "the common good," but there isn't a thing of "the common pain." Every person's pain is intense and intensely personal. It cannot be calculated with GDP, income per capita, or growth rate. 

Although each person feels his or her own pain in a most intimate and personal way, it is fortunate that humans can also feel each other's pain. As flawed and limited as our empathy inherently is, most people are able to be touched by and even share each other's suffering. This is why the case of 拉姆 caused so much outrage among Chinese netizens. She may be a single case, an anecdote, and a statistical blip in the 1.4 billion Chinese people or 7.6 billion humans on earth, but most people are able to feel some pain for her, and this empathetic pain and outrage in turn provoke a strong sense of justice, a strong wish to make life safer and better for all women, at least those who are still alive at the moment. 

What the fuck has 100 years of women's progress around the world done for her? 

Strangely enough, feeding people statistics, however true and correct, will not provoke the same strong emotions. If I were to tell you, say, 2586 women were murdered by their husbands in the Sichuan Province last year (I made up the number), which, according to rational commentators like Pinker, is theoretically bad and calls for something to be done, does it provoke any urge to do something, to change, and to help? (I don't need to quote Stalin on this, do I?) 

In fact, one could argue that much (perhaps most?) of the social progress in the past 50 to 100 years came from just this kind of natural outrage, indignation, and empathy for individual tragedies. A photo of a black boy being attacked by police dog in Alabama. A photo of a naked Vietnamese girl running down the road with soldiers behind her. A video of a black man being killed by a white policeman. A headshot of a battered woman. It is pain, perhaps more than joy, that forces us to realize our shared humanity.

Rationalists such as Pinker like to credit all social progress to science and technology and economic growth, as if scientific advances alone can inevitably and irresistibly push society into a more equal, fair, and just direction. They dismiss people's empathy and outrage for individual tragedies as biased, sensational, and irrational, when these are merely natural humanity. They never mention all the laws and rules and public opinions that have been instituted or changed by a mother's tear-stained face or a starving child's eyes. 

So one has to wonder: Does Steven Pinker feel my pain? 

I don't know whether Bill Clinton feels your pain or my pain (I very much doubt it but at least he bothers to pretend), but Pinker is giving all kinds of signals that he does not. 

Work, Meaning, etc.

Through this article on FT, I stumbled into a rabbit hole and just barely pulled myself out before sinking a whole evening into reading more and more lateral links on this subject.

Does work have meaning? What a can of worms. If yes, what is it and why is it so obscure? If no, why work beyond the poverty level?

Of course, on the most fundamental level, the purpose --- if not meaning --- of work is survival. Survival of the self and our genes. It's simple.

But then it got more and more complicated.

Just like "happiness," the word "meaning" should send a shiver down anyone's spine. Both are so chronically abused by cliches and wishful thinking and propaganda that they have by now lost all meaning.

When economists barged into the happiness business, all hell has broken loose. The problem is that economists do not see individuals when they think about people. So intent are they in seeking universal theories about the world and, worse, people, that they would never stoop to the level of individual persons and observe their similarities and differences --- some external and some internal, some constant and some ever-changing. And yet, without taking the interperson and intraperson complexities into consideration, the search for a universal theory of meaning or solution to happiness is doomed.

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Post Script: Actually, the whole point of this post is that all the talk about "meaning" --- as in the meaning of work, the meaning of life, blah blah blah --- reminds of me Harari's assertion that almost everything that binds human society together is fiction: morality, religion, human rights, and money.

Or I prefer to quote GRRM:

"Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”
“So power is a mummer’s trick?”
“A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill.”

It applies to the modern concept of "meaning" just as well. Meaning is what one assigns to it. No more and no less. There, GRRM has solved the existential question for ya.

Against Beauty

Recently a twitter account known as @femscriptintros created a bit of a stir. Ross Putnam, a movie producer who gets to see a lot scripts, is putting cliched introductory notes of female characters onto twitter. To be perfectly honest, at first I didn't see what was wrong with some of the entries, besides the impoverished imagination and writing. It only dawned on me after a bit of thought that every intro refers to the female character's physical beauty one way or another.

Yes, I know, the irony. I never thought of myself as having been indoctrinated by the patriarchal social values, but I had never questioned the insidious effect of "beauty." It is the only way to describe a good woman, a woman who is worth anything. Of course, physical beauty is superior, but if physical beauty is utterly out of the question (for example, a biopic of Mother Teresa), her other attributes, usually her heart and least likely her mind, would be assigned that description -- beautiful. All along I have believed that the highest compliment a woman can receive is her beauty.

But now the question is abundantly clear. Men are good and worthy in many various ways. Damn they don't even need to be good or worthy to be interesting or just ... to live. Men don't need to be anything but themselves --- OK I know this is gross simplification. Men too are imprisoned by their gender and social expectations, but women are still far more restricted. What's more disturbing than the externally imposed limitations is our internalized, self-imposed ones.

Golden State Warriors

According to NBA schedule, the match between GSW and Washington Wizards on February 3 was the last (only?) game of the 2015-2016 season to have GSW in the Verizon Center. Thus it was no surprise that the ticket prices reached a height for the Wizards franchise not seen in the past 6 years, surpassing even the Eastern Conference semifinals in the past 2 seasons. When Mr. S and I arrived at the arena before the door opened, the lines were swarming 7th Ave between F and G Streets.

"Everyone's a Warriors fan now," said the middle-aged man in the seat to my right. "It's like a teabag. Just dip it in hot water and you get tea, every time." Hmm ... He was no new fan, as he lives in Marine County, across the Bay from Oakland. 

I'm one of those freshly brewed Warriors fan, swept onto the Stephen Curry bandwagon only a couple of months ago, after over a decade of indifference to  NBA. I did watch the televised playoffs for a few years in the 1990s, when Michael Jordan was approaching his first retirement. Perhaps it was the resignation in a sports commentator's voice I heard on NPR, when he talked about Curry. The tone brought up the memory of how people were talking about Jordan, implying something like, "Here comes a mad genius. What can anyone do but lie down and be trampled?" 

And trample he did. In the game against Wizards, Curry scored 51 points. I must say that Wizards fought hard and played especially well. John Wall scored 41 points. Nene almost hit every free throw. GSW nevertheless won by 13 points in the end, but the match was, at one point, only a 2-point game. It was in the middle of second quarter, I said to the man from California, "If something should happen to Curry, where would the Warriors be?" He thought about it and agreed, "Yeah, they'd be a middling team." 

Beyond marveling at the impossible speed of the play --- I tried to catch a glimpse of formations and ball movement, but the only thing I saw was a few picks and rolls --- I wondered about what is the so-called "star quality." What is the quality that makes a team build their strategy around one player, so that he makes or breaks their success over a whole season, or several seasons? How does this shape the interpersonal dynamics and motivations of the non-star players in a team setting? Do they envy him and resent him while also depending on him? I used to think that individual sports, like figure skating and tennis, are more psychological than team sports, like football (soccer and basketball). But I might be wrong there. 

The Californian man said, "The other guard, Klay [Thompson], is actually as good as Steph, he just doesn't believe it." 

I was reminded of Scottie Pippen. All those years ago I had a very low opinion of Pippen. I thought Jordan was hitting all the crucial jumpshots and layups in the last quarter, while Pippen was missing them. He was just riding on Jordan's coattail. Only now I saw my error. There can never be two Jordans in one team. Why? I don't know. It was no small feat for Pippen to remain a good player, steady and uncomplaining at Jordan's side. 

At the next game, Curry shot rather poorly and scored only 26 points. Oklahoma City Thunder nearly won the match. Near the end, the teams were tied at 104. And yet, Curry either scored or assisted and was responsible for a string of successful offense efforts in the final few minutes. GSW won 116-108, despite Kevin Durant's 40 points. What makes a player so ... clutch? So deadly that his teammates mentally rely on him? I am convinced this is more than physical talent and superhuman effort. A key ingredient must be psychological.

Stars like Jordan and Reggie Miller and Kobe Bryant, now Curry, have been described as "cold-blooded" or having "killer instinct." It is not that they lack mercy while mere mortals are unconsciously reluctant to defeat the rivals. Rather, the mere mortals are inhibited by something other than mercy --- perhaps an anticipation of victory and all its spoils and associated fear of losing all those by one's own failure. I think the ancient Indians had it right --- only when one detaches himself from the fruit of his action, be it bitter or sweet, can he find the courage and focus to do what he must do now. And the effect may be even stronger on others around him.  

The Dolezal Case and Outsiders

One can never tell exactly what motivated Rachel Dolezal to pretend to be a black woman. Besides all the complexes and embarrassment that she has provoked in many Americans, black and white and, oddly, transgendered people and their advocates (fascinating how they got mixed up in all this), there is a kernel of recognition of a common --- perhaps even universal --- phenomenon. Here is a person who at some point feels that she does not belong in her environment and wants to find the sense of belonging elsewhere. She wanted to find the sense of belonging among black people, for whatever reason, and was willing to pile on lie after lie to get it. Is that so strange?

Coincidentally, I saw a documentary about Broadway musicals a few weeks ago. The short version is that nearly all notable Broadway musicals were written by Jews (except Cole Porter). They wanted to talk about their feelings of being outsiders in the American society, but in the musicals they chose to express it through other outsiders rather than Jewishness. Hence we got "West Side Story" with Puerto Ricans, "South Pacific" with Polynesians, "Showboat" with blacks, even "The King and I" with reversed roles between whites and Asians. And the kicker is that everyone loves them. Not only the immigrants who all see themselves in the disguised Jews, but even the dominant white audience find themselves in the stories of outsiders. This sense of being excluded from other people and therefore alone in the cold outside has to be a feeling that is universally appealing.

The stories of social outcasts and outsiders are the mainstream of literature and other forms of narratives. That is the irony. If the majority feels alone, are they alone in their likeness, or are they alike in their loneliness?

I wonder if there are people who never feel a sense of isolation and loneliness from time to time. Extroverts? Bullies? Psychopaths? It seems obvious that they are either nonexistent or definitely in the minority. For most of us, what would it take to rid oneself of the sense of being alone in the universe once and for all? Maybe nothing. Maybe that is just one of the permanent human conditions that we want to escape but have to live with, like the inevitability of birth and death.

Another phenomenon that had baffled me until I understood the universality of loneliness is fandom. Average people identifying with famous people in various fields and projecting themselves onto these strangers. People feel such a deep connection and kinship with flickering images or words of the page or glimpses from faded pictures. In the fans' mind, the self and the idol merge into a strange entity that is neither the same nor separate. The idol's success feels sweeter than the fan's own success, and the idol's failure more bitter. The animosity between two opposing camps of fans can be intensely vicious, despite the lack of real conflicts or harm to the celebrities in question. Anyone with exposure to figure skating would be familiar with the venomous and vehement battles between fans of Yuna Kim and Mao Asada, or Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski, or Plushenko and Lysacek. I am not immune to this type of sentiment, even though I never understood why.

Now I think I do. Public celebrities serve as a conduit for our need to escape the feeling of being alone outside the crowd. Their function is two fold. In their public glamor and glory, we boost our own sense of worth through projection. In sharing our adoration with other fans we get a sense of togetherness and belonging to a larger group. What wouldn't we do to come inside, away from the cold, even if for a moment of hallucination and self deception, like the little Matchgirl in the Hans Christian Andersen story. Note that Andersen was a very typical outsider and, with his stories about being the outsider, moved millions of readers.

Of course, the more realistic and less hallucinatory realm where one escape the loneliness is family. But family carries their own risk of disillusion. Knowing someone so closely and intimately can dispel the sense of belonging and heighten the feeling of difference. Fantasy togetherness with strangers, on the other hand, can be as perfect as your imagination can achieve.

Thus the space created by the Internet is most curious. The people you are sharing message with on the other side of email or Web site or group chat are real. You feel like you know them, but not too much to dispel the sense of belonging. If you know how to play this game, you can be as close as you want without being too close to be reminded that, in the end, we still each live out here.

Oh, and another irony. Every time I read about how lonely it is "at the top" for famous people (or superheroes in comics) --- being so famous that they cannot mix with ordinary people and have to keep to their sad loneliness as celebrities, I laugh. Isn't the point of being famous to be universally admired and never be left out (again)? Yet, somehow, by being "special" one might exclude oneself from the common experience of feeling alone and insignificant.

People Who Comment Without Reading

Recently I vented a bit about the cesspool of online comments. Today I saw a commentary on NPR's Web site about people who furiously pass along and madly debate and flame an article without reading it first ("How to Tell Who Hasn't Read the New 'Atlantic' Cover Story by Gene Demby). It is both sad and hilarious.

Normally I would lump it in the category that people don't read such a story because of the fear and shame and anger at the merest mention of the ultimate American Scar (or a wound that continues to fester?), ie, slavery and racism. Unfortunately, it is not just slavery and racism that get furiously and nonsensically debated without thought or reading. Nowadays it is nearly everything. It seems that the majority of online commenters comment just to fill up a void in their own mental and emotional space. The majority of comments have nothing to do with what the commented article says or related issues. Commenting is just a distraction to forget about a widening black hole of loneliness.

What is more lonely than talking right past each other on and on, never once locking eyes or hearing each other?

Online Comments

I don't know the origin of the saying but someone compared online comments to sewage. Seems about right to me.

Reading online comments to articles never yields any substantive benefit or enlightenment or satisfaction that lasts more than five minutes. Of course not all comment sections are excrement. New York Times and The Onion's AV Club have a markedly higher density of non-pukable comments on their Web site. (The Onion's own site wisely avoids the comment section altogether.) But these are exceptions. Most online comments are ... stupid is less of a problem than the mindnumbing dullness. So boring. So predictable. So repetitive. The comment sections are largely filled with pathetic attempts to make commenters feel smarter, wiser, better, and more consequential than they really are. A kind of mental masturbation. One can leave dozens of comments under YouTube videos mocking Adele's fatness. Does that change an iota of one's own worthlessness in comparison to Adele's magnificence?

Yet the crushingly dull banter floating in the sewage of Internet holds a kind of bizarre attraction for me. Whenever I read a semi-interesting piece, my finger on the mouse automatically pull the cursor down to scan the comment section. I caught myself doing this and began to wonder why. I seem to have a morbid curiosity for this crap and get micro-thrills akin to opening emails.

Perhaps it is akin to eaves dropping on a bunch of chattering strangers in a closed room. What's the gossip? What are people saying about this and that? What is on their mind? And then the question is why am I so keen on hearing the chatter. Why do I care what people are saying?

A friend of mine recently mentioned that she dragged herself up in the middle of the night to attend a company teleconference in a different timezone. She didn't need to but felt compelled. What are the news? She did not want to be left out. I suspect that this curiosity for neighborhood gossip is behind the many hours I have wasted on reading worthless sewage in the online comment sections.

When Will Health Care Ever Cost Less?

The answer is, when you reduce the amount and degree of care provided. It's an answer nobody wants to hear but it's true.

On this year's Veteran's Day, a talk show on NPR mentioned the treatment of war-caused PTSD in veterans. A caller asked why PTSD is so common among veterans of modern wars but was not nearly as common back in WWII or before. The experts and/or insiders of course corrected them that back then the same post-combat neuroses was not diagnosed as PTSD but rather was called other names, such as shell shock. Most of the sufferers were not treated, because the medical community didn't know how. So many of them treated themselves with alcohol and psychoactive drugs, and died premature deaths.

Fifteen years ago when I was in school, managed care and preventive care was all the rage. The argument was that if you give people health care before they get very sick, they would live longer and healthier lives, and the cost of health care for a population would go down or at least not continue to go up. The reality of the next decade and half has proved them wrong.

The logical flaw in the managed care premise is obvious: If people live longer and healthier, they would only get sick later, but they would get sick and eventually die anyway. Why would they need less health care in totality?

One might argue that if a person lives longer and healthier and delays the inevitable aging and illness leading to death, he could work longer and produce more in his life. I would argue, however, that the longer he works, the more disposable income he has to spend on treating his illness and delaying his death. How would that reduce the cost of health care?

Spend some time with old people and it will become abundantly clear. The demand for health care is a bottomless pit, because the thirst for life and fear of death is boundless. It is usually limited only by what medical science and technology can offer at the time. Before an elixir is invented to extend people's lifespan to 70 years, people did not spend money on it and died at 69. After the elixir is invented people spend their money to buy another year of life. The same can be said for any other treatment. Before there was penicillin, where would people with infection spend their money on? Before there was methotrexate and paclitaxel, where would people with cancer spend their money on? Not on health care. Once the treatments become available, how can you not spend money on them?

Very occasionally, spending money on one treatment can save you money on alternative treatments. For example, spending on Prozac has saved a lot of cost on psychotherapy. But such cases of saving are uncommon. Most of time, medical advances are like urban sprawl --- build it and people will come. As long as you have a few more years of life or less pain to sell, people will buy it, if they can afford it.

Built on good intentions, the third-party payers of health care only make the cost balloon. Socially it is a sensible philosophy to want to give most people access to most life prolongation technologies. Psychologically, it removes the financial measurement out of individual person's calculation. How much are you willing to pay to prolong your life for another month? If you have a billion dollars, you may be willing to pay a few hundred million. If you have a hundred dollars, you may be willing to pay fifty, saving the rest for a last meal. If you have none and need your parents or children to cough up their life savings, you might spend nothing and choose to give up the last month of your life.

However, once this contemplation is taken out of individual's consideration and put in the hands of an insurance company or the national payer, I bet everyone feels the urge to want to spend "as much as possible" to prolong one's life. It's no longer your own money you spend on the care you need and want. Everyone wants the longest life money can buy.

If I were to devise a system that can truly stem the escalating cost of health care, I would use the collective money pool (as all medical insurance, be it public or private) to take care a set of treatments that have a finite amount of cost. Beyond that, you or your guardians decide how much you want to spend to prolong your life. If you get pneumonia, the system pays for your antibiotic treatment. If your pneumonia turns into sepsis and spending a hundred thousand dollars may save your life, you or your family will have to decide if you can and want to spend the money on that. Such a system assumes that life has a price. Above that price, the system will not pay for life.

This proposal sounds horrible, I know. Life has a price. Shudder. It also highlights the gross inequality between people --- If you have more money, you can afford to live longer. If you don't, you get the basic but less care and therefore shorter life, most likely. However, in another sense, the system is quite equal. It assumes that, to the system, a rich man's life is worth the same as a poor man's. The system spends the same amount on each person. And, because this system does not endlessly escalate, it is able to sustain itself and ensures the largest number of people get at least basic care. The rest is left to the random draw of luck, be it your wealth or your genes, and your own choice.

Ripping Apart Teleology

Saw an article by Steven Poole about Nagel and teleology, which is basically in agreement with what I wrote a few days ago.

Science can’t stop talking in terms of ‘purposes’, but if the universe cares about us, it has a funny way of showing it.

Well, I don't think it's "science" that can't stop talking about 'purpose' but rather philosophers.

The impenetrable mystery to me is why or how some people seem to be physiologically unable to imagine a universe in which his own consciousness is not at the center and everything else revolves around it. The answer might have nothing to do with cosmology or philosophy, but psychology --- as in the incurable narcissism some people are afflicted with. But then follows another impenetrable mystery: Why isn't the incurable narcissist's ranting immediately dismissed? Why are the nonnarcissists of the world still talking about it as if it's worth the paper it's printed on? 

Again, Something versus Nothing

Perhaps this is what Jung referred to as synchronicity. A few days after I wrote the blog entry about what I think about the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?", Oliver Burkeman published a rather amusing feature in Guardian on an amateur philosopher who claims to have solved the mystery of universe. This jewelry dealer and philosopher's answer is --- potential.

Whatever. I don't intend to discuss this philosophy. I just remembered a radio interview I heard some time ago with a female physics professor and researcher. She said something to the effect of "Yes there is a defined size to our universe and it is approximately 13.6 billion years old." Her point was that our universe is an enclosed system, like the inside of a ball. Also she said that it was pointless to ask what was there BEFORE the Big Bang, because "before" is a concept of time, and time did not exist outside of our universe, which was created by the Big Bang. If I understand correctly, she meant that time in itself is a product of the Big Bang, just like the 3 dimensional space itself, which is expanding as we speak. Time as we know it is just like space that exists only within the confines of our universe. Therefore there is no BEFORE the Big Bang because there was no TIME outside of the Big Bang.

Imagine a supernatural being who exists outside of our universe looking in, the same way as we, creatures of 3 dimensions, looking at an ant who lives in a 2-dimensional world. It seems obvious, isn't it, that time does not have to be infinite. It can be a line and a creature not actually ON the line can see any point on the line, but a creature living on the line can only see that particular point he is standing on? It is only the human memory that allows us to see a minute distance behind us on this line but not most of it. To organisms without memory, they live on a point, although not the same point from one instance to another, on this line.

But memory is but an illusion, not reality. It's a recording of the moment "then," which stands at some point behind "now" but it is not really "then." An analogy is that a photograph is merely a picture that depicts the image of a moment in the past, but what you are seeing now (when you look at the photograph) is the photograph, not the past itself. There is no contradiction of past and present existing together.

Anyway, so, what I'm trying to say is that humans often fall into the trap of being unable to distinguish the self, in the form of consciousness, and everything else that is not the self, including the molecular and chemical processes that enable consciousness. It is incredibly self-centered and grandiose and delusional, yes, but what else would you expect from the consciousness, especially that of men and especially that of men like Thomas Nagel (who believes that consciousness is the basis for the existence of the universe)? People do believe they are the center of the universe and they can't be reasoned out of it.

Imagine though that you were a supernatural being living outside of this 4-dimensional universe and time is but a thread laid out in front of you and means no mystery to you. You watch the little creatures crawling on the thread, blind to what lies before or behind them, yet, against all reality, they believe the electrochemical flutters in their head causes the universe to exist. Wouldn't you laugh your ass off, assuming you laugh? I vaguely remember Chuang Tzu saying something to this effect. Hmm, why do you need Nagel when you already have Chuang Tzu?

End of Phase 2

Phase 3 drug development may be the expected climax of a long story, but phase 2 is where the seeds are sown and the ending is set in motion. By the time phase 2 is half way through, one would have a pretty good idea about whether the drug would theoretically work. In other word, the concept is proved or disproved.

Yet, theory and reality often slip away from each other like two pieces of iceberg in the middle of an undercurrent. Any tiny or potential glitch --- a seemingly insignificant side effect, or a slightly messy or low receptor binding profile, for example --- could be blown up exponentially in phase 3 clinical trials, when many more subjects present many more real-life variations on the controlled laboratory/clinical environment. Some may have other clinical or subclinical conditions or genetic predispositions that negate the efficacy of the drug. Some may throw away the study drug and report they have complied with all instructions. Some may be hypochondriac and report every little discomfort as a side effect. Welcome to the real world.

The crux at the end of phase 2 is whether to abandon a drug or move it into phase 3. In today's pharmaceutical environment, the psychological incentive is overwhelmingly biased toward moving it along rather than letting it go. Look, it is easier to throw out a molecule when you've only spent a million dollars in animal studies or tens of millions in phase 1 trials. But when you've already sunk fifty million into the molecule, your psychological scale is inevitably tipped to the side of success. Of course, if the drug is clearly a dud in phase 2, the choice is easy if painful. Many times, however, the choice is just not clear. The drug might look good on a couple of efficacy endpoints but fail in another endpoint. Or the overall efficacy is no better than placebo, but it beats placebo in a couple of biomarkers. To phase 3, or not to phase 3, that is the question.

I have heard one theory that is unproven but rings true. In most companies, the same team fosters a molecule from start to finish. They feel psychologically invested in the drug after years of development and tons of their sweat and tears. By the end of phase 2, they see the drug less as a molecule, but more like a baby --- worse, their own baby! How can they resist throwing another hundred million dollars (often more) into phase 3 trials to see if the baby would turn out just fine?

If you do the math though, a few hundred million dollars could have run a few more molecules through phase 1 and phase 2 and potentially home in on one that works unequivocally. On the other hand, this could mean a delay in the rush-to-the-market arms race. Again, the mind is biased in favor of pushing into phase 3 despite all the doubts and questions.

To abandon a possible dud by the end of phase 2 makes everyone look bad. For a large company, it's an ugly truth that would send Wall Street analysts into a selling frenzy. For a small company, it could mean survival or bankruptcy. Thus all the more reason to put on a happy face and throw more good money after bad. 

Perhaps this is why we are seeing so many phase 3 flops lately --- the financial stakes are higher, the scrutiny is tighter, and the hypes more unrealistic. The chips are stacked against objective, ruthless decisions.

资本主义

In the past week I had three lunches with people I had worked with in the pharma industry. Although I should not have been shocked, I was nevertheless shocked all over again. ALL of this company's monoclonal antibodies in clinical development 7 years ago, for which I wrote many clinical trial protocols and study reports, are dead. Not one has reached approval. This company was and still is surviving on one drug, which has been on the market for over a decade. Thousands of employees, several manufacturing sites in operation, billions of dollars made on one drug and spent on the  research and development of at least a dozen new products, and thousands of patients in and out of clinical trials around the world. Nothing to show for.

This is the current state of pharmaceutical industry. Expensive failures plague companies large and small. However, small companies and large ones fail in different ways. For the small company, any kind of setback or delay could kill a promising molecule or the company itself, such as a disagreement with FDA on how to measure efficacy, or a couple of serious adverse events --- which may or may not be actually related to the drug --- or the bad luck of hitting a general recession. In large firms, molecules no better than placebo could eat up a few hundred million dollars before flopping spectacularly in Phase 3. It is commonplace to throw good money after bad until someone puts a hopeless candidate drug out of its misery. Last year Pfizer was sitting on $24 billion cash with nary a worthy molecule to spend it on.

I am tempted to believe that, in a free market, no other industry can get away with such outlandish inefficiency and absurdities and still survive for three decades, like the pharma industry has done. But then perhaps I'm wrong. At least the movie industry has been on a similar trend since 1975. Like the pharma industry, in which a few blockbuster drugs (hint: someone picked up this cross-sector term for a reason) support a huge infrastructure of waste, Hollywood has been operating with the same mechanism. The institution of waste has grown ever larger and more elaborate, because there is enough money to support it, until the money finally dries up and the whole party collapse onto itself.

Perhaps Parkinson's law, "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion," can be applied to not only bureaucracy but also corporations: The size and complexity of a corporation expands so as to fill the money available to support its existence. 

As different as they are, Hollywood and pharma have another similarity: Both are hugely complex systems that require a substantial amount of creativity. It has been noted by some that efficiency in a complex system requires conformity, which is incompatible with individuality and creativity. Therefore, one might deduce, reducing the system's complexity may be the only way to improve creativity. Hence the campaigns in favor of "flat organizations" and for corporations to pretend to be start-ups. Does it work? I doubt it. I have heard from more than one person that, while the upper management tries to eliminate layers of management immediately underneath, new layers of managers are created from the bottom.

One may argue that drug development (or movie-making, perhaps) is inherently complex and cannot be simplified. I'm not convinced. Movie-making CAN be cheaper and simpler without necessarily neglecting quality --- see independent movies and most movies made before 1975. The question is to construct an infrastructure that makes this profitable. Actually, that is exactly what's happening in television, which has seen good writing and high quality shows flourish on cable and video streaming. Hollywood, on the other hand, is being cannibalized from within by people like Michael Bay.

Can the small pharma players --- namely start-up biotechs --- find similar success as AMC or FX or Netflix? It's hard to predict. One player that sucks the air out of the room is regulatory agencies (not just FDA), who have neither the incentive nor the ability to help lower the cost of drug development. Still, other reforms are tried. Big pharma companies have cash. Sometimes I wonder whether they would have done better if they were simply converted to venture capitalists and stay out of R&D altogether. You want efficiency? Let CROs do all your clinical trials. You want innovation? Let small biotechs do the discovery. You just do your due diligence before throwing billions at a molecule. Break up this complex system into smaller sectors, like how the IT sector has separate subsectors in hardware, software, and telecommunication. Let each subsector stay small and specialized and competitive.

Alternatively, we can wait for the behemoth collapse and watch small new seeds grow out of the ruin. 

Talk About What You Know, Know What You Talk About

什么仁儿都有吧。在 YouTube 上找了几个不同版本的 "Being Alive" 来听，就看见留言里有人很不屑地说 Raul Esparza 的版本用了太多 vibrato，鼻音太重，声音不美，手脚不动，blah blah blah。原剧看过没？讲啥故事知道不？一个畏首畏尾没勇气投入生活的男人，到最后终于鼓起爱的勇气。完美的声音有个P用。我没看过现场表演，不敢说 Esparza 版本的 Bobby 是最好的，但是里面的感情却是真的，追求完美反而肯定是错了。跑到 YouTube 上炫耀自己多么精通歌剧唱腔和技巧，无聊透了。

同时回想起前两天看见的影评，好像还是 NPR 上影评人写的，Philip Seymour Hoffman 在 Jack Goes Boating 里的人物呆头呆脑，让人疑心他是弱智，我当时肚子里发怒：你TMD才弱智，你全家都弱智，看不懂就别胡说八道，有这精力专门去写 Transformer 3 的影评好了。

艺术本来就是主观的，观众各自看法不同，这没什么稀奇的，我最烦的是看也没看过就信口开河，讲的是啥都没搞清楚就滔滔不绝。这年头最热门的做法就是高谈阔论你从没读过的书。

History

Well, as I said before, I am extremely ignorant of history and should really shut the hell up about it. It is extremely dangerous to comment on someone's work based on skimming a few pages on Google Books and a little background stuff learned from Wikipedia. But, this is my blog and I can do whatever I want, so I might as well make a fool of myself here.

History is primarily about collecting facts. The rest is interpretation. It is both impossible and inevitable that historians should guess at the undercurrent of historical events --- Why? How? Why did things happen this way but not that way, in this moment but not that? Why did key figures (kings, emperors, generals) choose this road but not that road? What if?

From the little bit of stuff I skimmed, it seems that Ray Huang and his colleague/mentor Joseph Needham took an approach to studying Chinese history that is dispassionate and detached, quite the opposite of the traditionally moralistic tone that has dominated Chinese history since the days of 司马迁. Which is fine. The human history, especially a massive and massively complex one like Chinese history, is impossible to be thoroughly understood from all possible angles. One can use the macro-history or the micro-history approach to study it. Neither is righter than the other as long as the limitations are clearly drawn. There is no absolute truth.

Anyway, what the hell was I trying to say? Oh, yeah, it is extremely valuable to introduce an non-moralistic and macro approach to studying history. However, it seems to me that Huang and Needham might be a little too deterministic and a little too ambitious in trying to quantify and explain why things happened the way they did. I can't completely agree that the current history is completely inevitable and that China (or whatever) is this way because it has to be because its geography or scientific progress have forced it to go this way and none other was possible. Nor do I believe that it would have been drastically different if someone went back in time and stepped on a butterfly or shot Hitler dead.

OK, sorry, actually the puny amount of knowledge I have about history has been largely derived from the alternative history genre in science fiction. Anyway, my feeling is somewhere in between. On the one hand, it is obvious that geography, including connections and exchanges with neighboring civilizations, and agriculture and technology can play a key role in shaping history of a particular region or tribe. On the other hand, one must (well, there is no such thing as "must" in history, but that's what I believe) concede that random occurrences and coincidences have important effects in pushing the underlying tendencies in one direction or another. An innate propensity (deterministic elements such as geography or climate, or a family-centric hierarchical philosophy) is amplified or suppressed by fairly limited local circumstances, either spatial or temporal.

In my opinion (which of course nobody gives a ****), the most significant force in history is neither deterministic factors (ie, destiny) nor random events, but rather the cumulative weight of the past. A people with a history cannot one day wake up and make a U-turn from their long-held trajectory. If we really want to understand why something happens at a given time, we might have to take in account the few thousand years before it, as well as the fog, drizzle, and wind on that day. And we cannot predict what a people will do in the next year without considering where they and their ancestors have meandered on the road leading all the way to now. That's crazy, but somehow that is the way of human behavior.

Even an individual human is unable, in 100 years of his life, to veer too far from his life trajectory drawn before and immediately after his birth, how could a gigantic group of them, carrying enormous baggage of thousands of years through language, folklore, memes, morality, social structures, and value system --- known as collective unconsciousness --- do anything change drastically? Birds fly the same route year after year, generation after generation. Salmon swim to the same upstream place.

Nevertheless, accidents happen. One could be destined to live a long life thanks to his indestructible genes, but he might go out and get hit by a bus. A tribe might be great and stable, but the deterministic forces of geography and cultural characteristics cannot anticipate the rapid rise of a power who discovers a superweapon, or has such amoral advantage as carrying some resistance to smallpox or the plague, that crushes the great, stable, and virtuous tribe nevertheless. Historians are pretty good at delineating the past, but the future is anybody's guess.

One thing that bothers me is the role of history studies as a key tool in politics. Politicians frequently seek solutions to their current problems in history books, and historians write history books with the intention of advising and influencing current and future policies. I guess this tradition is good sometimes and bad other times. It helps the powerful rule effectively if they understand the patterns of people and events --- perhaps this is why Chinese politics is so sophisticated and labyrinthine. Nevertheless, it may be a mirage to hope that, because you know exactly what mistakes (?) were made to cause (?) the decline of the Ming Dynasty, somehow you can prevent your own dynasty's decline by avoiding these mistakes through policies and politics. A rationalized, macro-history view carries the risk of oversimplification, which may convince some that, if only we make our fellow tribesmen change and behave this way or that, we could avoid a repetition of another fall of the empire, the glory of the tribe will burn brightly forever, and somehow studying history can and should do all this. I think that's crap, but then what do I know?

***********

好吧，我也就是偶尔撒撒野，其实对这种学术话题既无知识也无兴趣。李约瑟这种学者我觉得副作用太大---虽然他不是故意的。真喜欢中国历史和文化，象 Robert van Gulik 那样最好，研究下古代闺房秘技，写写侦探小说，有益无害。

一辈子当两辈子使

人到中年，越来越觉得人生之有限，可以玩儿的时间看得到头，嫌不够多。难怪自古都想找长生不老药。Roy Walford 和其他搞 calorie restriction 的人相信限制热量摄取和保持低于标准程度的体重能让他们多活几年，结果人算不如天算，Walford 自己虽然坚持 calorie restriction，得了肌肉萎缩症而七十几岁就死了，不过还是有很多人鼓捣这个，少吃饭。对我没有可行性，不予考虑。

最近在 Jonah Lehrer 的 blog 上面看到一篇报道，讲人脑对时间的主观感受，特别是主观感受的长短差别，的生理根源。简略地概括，就是说有人研究表明人对时间长短的主观感受跟当时的记忆信息数量多少有直接关系。在固定一段客观时间里，记得的细节越多越生动，感觉这段时间越长；记得的细节越少，感觉时间越短。而人在惊吓过程中脑子的信号吸收过程特别有效，吸收一切环境和感官的信号细节，使人感觉时间被拉长了，而时间进程变慢了。

This is a deeply Proustian idea. It turns out that our sense of time is deeply entangled with memory, and that when we remember more – when we are sensitive to every madeleine and sip of limeflower tea – we can stretch time out, like a blanket.

这个理论是不是真的，天晓得，我觉得还没有足够的证据。当人觉得很闷很无聊的时候，似乎时间也过得很慢---至少当时如此，但是事后啥也不记得。总之我觉得对于时间的主观感受这件事，我们的研究工具和方法还远远不够精确，到底在量什么也没太搞清楚。

先把脑神经研究放一边，就讲记忆与经历。只是在不远的过去我才忽然意识到自己是一个非常非常怕死的人，从小就怕。为了尽量把“终点”推得越远越好，我一直下意识地往脑子里塞进去各种各样的新鲜信号。虽然不是个行动的巨人，但是在脑处理/记忆方面加以补偿，一旦空闲下来就感到恐慌，到处搜寻新东西新刺激灌进去。导致直接的结果是不停地找书看，简直是种 compulsion。想起最近出门旅游的时候---其实过去旅游也是这样---忍不住到处乱走，即使没看什么名胜古迹，只要周围是新鲜画面和街坊背景，就觉得很刺激很兴奋，走啊走，几乎要瘫掉都舍不得停下来，好像打了鸡血似的。寻求新鲜刺激，陌生的感官信号，让脑子里的 dopamine 哗哗哗开了水龙头似的暴流，记忆也因此生动鲜明，记录大量的细节。主观感受显得人生被“抻长”了，因为增加了记忆中的内容。

Dopamine 的释放强化记忆的形成与保存，这是经过试验证明的：给老鼠打了 cocaine 之后，它们脑子里 dopamine 暴流，对当时的环境的记忆也特别鲜明持久。所以涅，如果没有频繁的新鲜刺激，cocaine 对保存记忆细节的效果也类似，只不过比较麻烦的是用cocaine 留下的鲜明记忆也包括当时多么多么high，令人更容易上瘾（因为一看见相同环境就回忆起high的感觉），变成一个vicious cycle。

我这样还不算什么，有更加急吼吼地不停寻求感官和新鲜刺激的人们，想必他们是更加迫切地感受到/惧怕终点的迫近，余生之短暂，因此更加要把人生的记忆塞得爆棚，一辈子当两辈子三辈子用。有时候我也会羡慕那些心灵平静的人，岁月静好，没有恐慌感，但是似乎我没生成那样的人。

GK Chesterton's Defense of Pulp Fiction

Excerpts from A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls

In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human.

[T]his is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them.


If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal.


[W]ith a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.

He sure did hate intellectuals and all other kinds of thinkers and learned men hahaha. For someone like GK Chesterton, being right (or wrong) is entirely beside the point. It's all good and fun and cool, but one can take only a small dose at a time, or one would despair enough to convert to Catholicism too. Excessive cleverness can eat up reality like a black hole eating up matter. In all his anti-hypocrisy observations, intellectual dueling with his contemporaries, and swirling arguments, the ground you stand on quickly disappears, and soon enough there is nothing left beneath your feet. At least that is how I feel every time I take a slight overdose of GKC.

Tiresome

Christopher Hitchens may have won Roger Ebert's admiration and sympathy for being a fierce dying intellectual, but I just find him tiresome. I can't waste my short, limited life on reading things that I find silly and ridiculous.

It's like people somehow believe a beautiful person must be good. Just because some people have a talent for stringing words together in a powerful and persuasive and seductive way to stir up many people's feelings and the urge to agree with him, it does not make them any less silly and ridiculous. Tiresome, tiresome, tiresome.

Sorry he has cancer and is suffering and is scared that he will soon die. But he is not any less tiresome because of that. The more he is convinced of his own righteousness the more I find him utterly dull. I don't wish him ill but I do find the pomposity of these intellectuals so tiresome.

圣人不死，大盗不止。

立此存照

省得每次都要放狗搜。出自：Jonah Lehrer's The Frontal Cortex Blog:

We like to believe that the gift of human reason lets us think like scientists, so that our conscious thoughts lead us closer to the truth. But here’s the paradox: all that reasoning and confabulation can often lead us astray, so that we end up knowing less about what jams/cars/jelly beans we actually prefer. So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host. That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality. Instead, it only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false. (Put another way, we’re not being rational – we’re rationalizing.)

对暗号

最近跟一个男性老朋友聊天，说起为什么男作家老写一见钟情的故事。他说没错，我经常一眼就能看出自己是否被陌生女人吸引，看出陌生女人是不是我感兴趣的类型，啊，有一种不可言传的品质。

我说我的脑子跟你的脑子显然线路两样的。我从来就不能仅从外表看出是否会喜欢一个陌生人。当然，从外表可以看出某些人我肯定对之没兴趣，但是那些也许有兴趣的只能靠凑上去搭几句（或者还得多搭几句），说不定还得进行其他考察之后才能确定是不是让我感兴趣的类型。

一见钟情的事情，老子好像没干过---哦不，忽然想起大学里有过那么两起没搭上话就暗恋别人的事件，不过那是荷尔蒙狂飙的时代，十多年前的事情了。而且那也只是观望而已，我仍然不会没搭过话就知道自己到底会不会将人列为“可发生关系”的名单。

Deal-breakers

Every mating-age person, men as well as women (I believe), has been asked or thought about what qualities his or her spouse should possess. This is one of the best example of the separation between the conscious and unconscious mind. I have never, ever seen anyone's list of "What I want in my husband (wife)" to be truly what they end up with. If you have such a list, you might as well tear it up because the likelihood of your conscious and unconscious lists matching each other is no better than random. (I have no research to back up this claim, so it is my opinion.)

And the funny thing is, the unconscious list always wins. Maybe the word "always" is too strong and absolute. Maybe it is "nearly always." People do end up with what they want. It is not to say that some do not go with the conscious (rather than unconscious) list of what they want, but conflicts with the unconscious wants usually kill the marriage quickly. In nearly all cases, people believe (falsely) that they are happily married because they adhered to their conscious list.

For example, a person may fit all of the written criteria of a perfect spouse, but one tiny defect (for example, a body odor that you dislike, eating with his mouth open if it bothers you, or a mole on the face or too many freckles) can elicit enough visceral disgust to erase all those great qualities you have said you want.

This is why it is entirely useless to draw up lists of qualities you want in a spouse. Because nobody knows what they want --- unconsciously but decidedly. Yes, it may be unfair and stupid that we humans have so little access with our unconscious thinking and have to rely on the half-deaf, half-blind conscious thoughts.

Unlike Freud’s theory, the separation between the conscious and unconscious minds is not caused by active suppression by social norms and childhood/adult learning. It’s just the anatomy and physiology. The human brain is very, very far from a perfect machine, fancy as it already is. Poorly designed and poorly made. Sort of like Windows Vista --- good enough to do some computation, but also full of glitches and inefficiencies and deficiencies.

So all we have is this thin layer of consciousness, a tiny accessory within a giant machine. It can barely pick up what others think and feel and knows only a little more what the rest of the brain thinks and feels. What it doesn’t know, it just makes it up: cobble together some stuff from the outside and some fragments from within and make up a coherent fairy tale to entertain itself. Of course, it firmly believes its own importance. There is no brain but the conscious brain, it thinks. It is wrong, of course, but it is hardly able to know that, because it is not very powerful or smart.
So what’s the point? What’s the point of having criteria for your mate? No point. The true criteria are those your unconscious mind keeps, and your conscious mind can’t even read them. The only thing one can do is follow one’s gut. When your gut tells you something is a deal-breaker, that you cannot stand it, you’d better trust the gut. It is the most powerful thing that controls you.

Also because one is dominated by the unconscious (at least in the case of long-term relationships), it is no use to make predictions on things you have not experienced. Without actual experience, one would never know a certain quality or characteristic bothers you. For example, you would never know a pair of very big feet or the ability to speak Italian ("A Fish Called Wanda") will turn you off or on until you actually see and touch the feet or hear the Italian phrases ringing in your ear. The unconscious mind is excellent at making snap decisions at the moment, but is extremely feeble in predicting the future, especially when there is no past expereince to base the prediction on.

The same goes for making friends, choosing a car to buy, and other choices in life. If someone or something disgusts or repulses you, accept that and move on.

That is not to say that the unconscious is never wrong, but rather that it is much more accurate than the conscious. In addition, someone or something that repulses you today may no longer do so a month or 10 years later. Your unconscious cannot predict that.

There are many people out there that I cannot stand. I used to think that it was not nice and I might be too quick to judge. However, I should have more faith in my own instinct.