Culture, Policy, and Events

Unpersuadable

The two things I find most distasteful in a human being are actually closely related: self-righteousness and hypocrisy. Consequently, whatever the subject of debate is, I find plenty to be uneasy about. Conviction can be a beautiful thing, so long as it does not serve as an excuse to treated one's fellow homo sapiens as so many polluted lepers.

Will Storr investigates the tension between conviction and critical thinking farther than I ever will in his new book The Unpersuadables and runs into the problem that he A) knows he must be wrong about something but B) believes his opinions are right about everything. My answer would be humility, or, at least, the discipline of being polite to everyone. There is a detailed review over at Salon.com.

Such rumination undermines Storr’s faith in his convictions, rooted as they once were in the rather quaint confidence that human beings make up their minds rationally. Instead, exploring recent developments in neuroscience, he learns that we believe first — engaging mental models formed early in life and rarely amenable to change — and come up with the reasons for it afterward. By the now-familiar process of confirmation bias, we ignore what doesn’t support our most favored notions, and shine a brilliant spotlight on the ones that do. Our minds operate unconsciously to a flabbergasting degree, while our consciousness is forced to tag along after, cooking up convincing rationales. “We do not get to choose our most passionately held views, as if we are selecting melons in a supermarket,” is Storr’s provocative conclusion.

The Abusive Self-Appointed Nannies

Among my uncritically held beliefs is that when your absence of humility blinds people, you should be held accountable. Not with jail time, public flogging or judicial maiming but public outing and shaming; and those who have faith-based opposition, including illegal activity, has slowed the development of Golden Rice should be ashamed.

By 2002, Golden Rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the Vitamin A-producing gene from carrots into rice, had handed all financial interests over to a non-profit organization, so there would be no resistance to the life-saving technology from GMO opponents who resist genetic modification because big biotech companies profit from it. Except for the regulatory approval process, Golden Rice was ready to start saving millions of lives and preventing tens of millions of cases of blindness in people around the world who suffer from Vitamin A deficiency.
It’s still not in use anywhere, however, because of the opposition to GM technology. Now two agricultural economists, one from the Technical University of Munich, the other from the University of California, Berkeley, have quantified the price of that opposition, in human health, and the numbers are truly frightening.

Everything has Trade-Offs

From War is Boring:

In 1969, the Soviet navy shocked the U.S. and NATO militaries with a new and incredibly capable submarine—one that could swim faster and dive deeper than anything else under the sea.But the seven high-tech-class submarines—able to reach 45 knots and 2,400 feet—were actually inferior where it really mattered. Their speed and depth-resistance came at the cost of noisy internal machinery that made them easy to detect … and destroy.

Libya Continues to Fall Apart

And we continue to try to manage it without risking anything to resolve it.

American Navy Seals have seized a North Korea-flagged tanker which had been loaded with crude oil at a rebel-held port in eastern Libya, the Pentagon said on Monday.

The operation to take control of the Morning Glory came a week after Libya failed to prevent the tanker from leaving the rebel-controlled eastern port of Es Sider loaded with an estimated $20m cargo, in a crisis that has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

"The Morning Glory is carrying a cargo of oil owned by the Libyan government's National Oil Company," said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. "The ship and its cargo were illicitly obtained from the Libyan port of Es Sider."

There were no casualties in the operation, which took place in international waters off the coast of Cyprus. The operation to take control of the Morning Glory came a week after Libya failed to prevent the tanker from leaving the rebel-controlled eastern port of Es Sider loaded with an estimated $20m cargo, in a crisis that has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Live better and live longer: correlation or causation?

Why should I care? Enjoy more muscle in the everyday and enjoy more everydays before that day when you do not.

New UCLA research suggests that the more muscle mass older Americans have, the less likely they are to die prematurely. The findings add to the growing evidence that overall body composition — and not the widely used body mass index, or BMI — is a better predictor of all-cause mortality.
The study, published in the American Journal of Medicine, is the culmination of previous UCLA research led by Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, an assistant clinical professor in the endocrinology division at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, that found that building muscle mass is important in decreasing metabolic risk.

"As there is no gold-standard measure of body composition, several studies have addressed this question using different measurement techniques and have obtained different results," Srikanthan said. "So many studies on the mortality impact of obesity focus on BMI. Our study indicates that clinicians need to be focusing on ways to improve body composition, rather than on BMI alone, when counseling older adults on preventative health behaviors."