Just Finished Reading Exercised by Daniel Lieberman

Daniel Lieberman's academic title is "paleoanthropologist", a mouthful that I'm confident he's gotten quite well at enunciating...I, though, have some catching up to do.  I first saw him in a YouTube interview on the excellent channel Diary of a CEO and was impressed enough to check out his book Exercised from my public library.  Its premise resounds like Lieberman's interview: humankind evolved not to engage in exercise, but to avoid it. He posits his theory based on his academic research living among different ongoing hunter-gatherer cultures in various parts of the world.  There the people's lives are doubtless physically strenuous, but only when their necessities, such as hunting, demand it.  Otherwise, they seem quite lazy, sitting around and definitely not jogging or weightlifting.  Lieberman says that this is why people in more "advanced" technology-based cultures (such as presumably yours and mine) need to intentionally move our bodies even when labor-saving devices can do most of the physical work for us.  He believes that the advancement of the species through evolution is focused on getting the individual successfully past reproductive age, beyond which their survival into old age becomes more extraneous to the process.  But by assigning special social roles to the elderly that benefit the group's survival, they, too, can achieve long and healthy life spans.  Daniel Lieberman is a big advocate for both resistance and aerobic fitness training, and he himself is a long-distance runner. He also has something to say about the very passive way of sitting for long stretches of time in "advanced" cultures as opposed to the more squatting, fidgety way he observed in his field work of the more "primitive" peoples...our ways lower longevity. I liked both this book of his and his online interview.  Check it out if you have the time or inclination...

Just Finished Reading A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

A Beautiful Mind, published in 1998, is Sylvia Nasar's biography of American mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. (1928-2015).  It is better known for its 2002 Ron Howard-directed movie adaptation with the same title, starring Russell Crowe as Nash and which won the Academy Award for best picture that year.  Yet the movie diverges in major ways from the book that took me aback.  In both versions we are presented with the life story of a brilliant, accomplished academic whose young adult life was turn upside-down...as well as that of his loved ones...when he became afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia.  The film version, however, takes great liberties with Nasar's account, weaving its own imaginary tale about John Nash suffering from visual hallucinations (which he didn't) and imaginary friends and foes (again, he didn't).  According to the book, in the late 1950s Nash began to have grandiose delusions of his role in the world with conspiracy theories abounding...in today's dumbass world that would have got him elected president but back then it just got him committed...and released...and committed...and released.  Ron Howard's movie makes the story of Nash's life very compact and simple, omitting the Noble Prize-winning mathematician's earlier affair and love child, for which he denied financial support.  It also omitted the fact that even following his mental breakdown he continued to produce mathematical works, many of which Nasar bravely attempted to describe for us nonmathematical readers: in the film you'd think that all he did of significance was that prize-winning paper on economic equilibrium.  The book and the film each sought to sell a narrative about the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., but even though the print version was obviously closer to the truth about him, by its very structure and nature it was still far from what really happened.  A life is lived one minute, one hour...one day at a time and attempts to make a narrative tale out of it that conforms to traditional storytelling patterns is bound to distort it.  Although I found the movie version to be much more suspenseful, endearing and entertaining (I even bought the DVD), it's a bit unsettling to see how far it diverged from the true life of this extraordinary and flawed human being after reading Sylvia Nasar's excellent account.  If you saw the film...or didn't, for that matter...A Beautiful Mind will be a great ride through history...not only of one special individual's life, but also of the social and historical context in which he lived.  Sadly, in 2015 both John Nash and his wife Alicia perished in an auto crash in Newark after returning from Norway, where he had been honored with an academic prize...he was 86... 

I got two significant take-aways from the book and film.  One is that it's not prudent to automatically accept the truth and accuracy of a work's narrative and characterizations, just because the author or producer claims it to be nonfiction or based on real events: the very nature of the story structure with the presentation of a moral theme and the aim to be interesting is bound to twist it.  Two is that I think almost all of us, like Nash, believe in nonsensical, irrational...and sometimes farfetched ideas but that for "healthy" people they understand the extreme nature of those beliefs and thereby tend to avoid communicating them to others...unlike Nash, whose narcissistic sense of self-importance precluded this.  But if within society certain wacky ideas seem to become more mainstream then an explosion can ensue with masses of the population expressing adherence to them...do you know what I'm talking about?

The Burden of Relevancy in Academic Conversation

I have a daydream fantasy, one that I believe few others have.  It goes like this: along with all the inane radio talk shows hosted by political extremists, self-proclaimed experts on money or the law, paranormal promoters, and sports know-it-alls there is one program in which the host, a master of informed questioning, has as guests people who are knowledgeable and competent in diverse academic fields, ranging from medicine to physics to language to mathematics to agriculture to mechanics to economics...or anything else. In each interview they spend the allotted time exploring the actual content of the field for discussion, not necessarily its applications or implications to society or the guest's life history. Now I know this is just cognitive reverie on my part, but what if I were to become like that host and ask those around me about their own fields of expertise?  My guess is that they would mostly be reticent about sharing many details of their specialized knowledge, trying to steer the conversation toward their own life narrative or what career achievements they have won...and question my own rationale in asking them in the first place.  And simple curiosity and a desire to learn new things just don't sound like good enough reasons...there has to be demonstrated relevancy to push the topic forward.  On the other hand, since I haven't tried this how do I know that would happen? I do know that there is an increasing gulf in society between those "in the know" about science and technology and the bulk of the population, which at best takes it all for granted and at worst outright rejects science and advanced learning in favor of nonsensical notions...

Bill-O and Pinheads

I rarely watch Bill O'Reilly's show on Fox News Channel. Not necessarily because I always disagree with the guy; he makes some good points a lot of the time. No, I don't watch it because I am thoroughly repulsed by O'Reilly's bullying, overbearing personality. He has even boasted of being a bully in his youth, and with no remorse at having made life so unnecessarily miserable for others. I used to be able to partially get around my overwhelming aversion to his presence by listening to his radio show when I was at work (this kept me from actually having to look at him). But alas, his show wasn't caustic and hateful enough, and the station's producers decided to put a wingnut hatemonger extremist on in his place to suit the "choir" that this station wanted to preach its right-wing ideology to. Now you may ask, why not just listen to O'Reilly's TV show without actually looking at the jerk? Well, as long as I actually have access to television, there are many, many other channels that I would prefer to watch. So sorry, Bill-O, the only time I hear nowadays about what you're saying is when Keith Olbermann on MSNBC is ridiculing you!

Why even bring up Bill O'Reilly anyway? Because there is one recurring theme of his that resonates with me, which is his notion of another type of more subtle, insidious bully: the "pinhead". To O'Reilly, a pinhead is anyone who has characterized themselves as belonging to the social class of the intelligentsia and by so doing feels qualified to taut their views as if they had some kind of special aura of absolute truth to them. And if you disagree with them, then you are subject to being judged as stupid, ignorant, misled, bigoted, and/or biased. Much of the time, O'Reilly vents his wrath against those he labels as pinheads in the academic, judicial, and journalistic communities. And I tend to agree with him, with one significant modification.

Bill O'Reilly never calls a conservative a pinhead. I look at the US Supreme Court and see four glaring right-wing pinheads (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito) who have decided to deliberately ignore precedent and drastically rewrite law to fit their political agendas. Alito's negative reaction during Obama's criticism of a recent radical and highly controversial Court decision during his State of the Union address is pure, condescending pinhead behavior. Fox is loaded with other examples, but Bill-O will never bite the hands that feed him (Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch) by calling THEM out. So my view of a pinhead is bit broader than his.

My disparagement of pinheads is strongest when I explore the blogosphere. I have encountered blog after blog where the authors go to enormous lengths to emphasize their high-and-mighty academic credentials, usually in some highly specialized, arcane field. And then go on to act as if this qualifies them to go off on any rant they want about any topic, as if their opinion matters more just because they may have a trail of letters following their names. I guess this may be a revelation of sorts: to me, the term "pinhead" is roughly equivalent to the term "academic snob". Not that having academic credentials makes one a pinhead. I also know several people whose grace and maturity regarding their accomplishments and intellect would put me to shame.

There was an elderly gentlemen who was a regular many years ago at one of my local doughnut shops. Almost every time he came in, he would talk incessantly, constantly peppering his monologue with the claim that he had earned "59 degrees". No one that I know of around there ever challenged the poor old fool; they all liked him and tactfully overlooked his vanity and insecurity. He obviously felt as if his words needed the backup of his "academic qualifications" in order for others to respect them. This guy was an extreme example of what I find myself doing a lot: finding people's "vanity point" and "overlooking" it in the interests of good will and getting along. The way I see it, if others want to make fools of themselves, then who am I to stand in the way? And so I tend to let the pinheads in my life continue to delude themselves with their own fantasies of self-importance and superiority.

Who’s Happy?

“He’s dead, Captain. He died of too much happiness.” Thus said Dr. McCoy to Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series episode titled I, Mudd (I probably missed a word or two with my faulty memory). Sounds nonsensical, doesn’t it? Well, that’s because it was meant to be nonsensical (see this relatively inferior episode to find out why, although you may discover that you just wasted an hour of your precious life). But I think I may, too, have just heard a little “serious” nonsense on the subject of happiness.

On National Public Radio's news show this morning was a segment about a study done to determine what kinds of people were the happiest. Using questionnaire results spanning nearly twenty years in people’s lives, the researchers concluded that social networking played an important role. Those in the center of social networks supposedly tended to be happier than those on the fringes. And happiness was defined by the researchers by certain possible answers on the questionnaire.

Broadly speaking (that’s how the radio reporter termed it), those in the center of social networks were more likely to catch “happiness waves” (I’m not kidding) as they swept through the network than those on its edges. The reporter then posed the question: wouldn’t those in the center of social networks be equally more susceptible to “unhappiness waves”? The answer given astounded me: no, because unhappiness spreads at a slower, SEVEN PERCENT less rate than does happiness. Now how did they pull that number out of the hat?!

I’m not against people speculating on subjective concepts like happiness and spreading their opinions around. After all, I do that sort of thing on this blog. But please don’t dress it all up with scientific, academic trappings and present it as some kind of objective truth! I could have just as easily assigned my own felt “happiness” weights to the different questions on their questionnaire, based on my own subjective values.

Everyone’s different, and happiness is not something at all quantifiable or even open to objective research. Going back to Star Trek (this time the beginning of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a good movie), a recuperating Mr. Spock is on his home planet of Vulcan. He is recovering his memory and is being reeducated. A specially programmed computer exhaustively tests him on his knowledge and skills in the sciences. Then it poses a question that totally stumps the “objective” Spock: “How do you feel?”

Scholastic Cyber-Priesthood

I just had a very unsettling personal experience. Relatively late in my life, but recent enough to be clear in my memory, I graduated from the University of Florida in December, 2002. To take the remaining few classes needed for my degree, I extensively used the UF Library West and its academic journals. Even by this time, some of the journals I needed articles from were on-line and restricted to those with the needed passwords and accounts (i.e. authorized scholars and students). But I could still freely access their valuable microform collection of newspapers that went back into the nineteenth century by simply finding the spool I was looking for, loading it into one of the simple machines provided in the microform room, and viewing it.

Since 2002, Library West was completely rebuilt and redesigned to be more compatible with our digital era. This past Monday evening, I went there for the first time since its recent reopening. And got thoroughly blasted with culture shock. Every student there, I mean EVERY student, had a laptop with them and was doing their work on it. That in itself was a major change in the span of six years for me. But the most unsettling and disturbing thing was that I could no longer access the microform collection since the machines were all now computerized and demanded user IDs and passwords. Except for one dilapidated old machine, the type of which I had never used and I would have had to stand at.

Digitalizing of our academic knowledge should be a liberating, not restricting experience. But nowadays, it seems that one either needs permission from the uppity muckity-mucks in academia or has to be willing to pay through the nose just for being able to read current academic journals or research microforms. Sure, I’m a UF alumnus and I can apply for the privilege of checking out books (for a fee) from UF libraries. And maybe with this I’ll be able to access the microforms as well. But before, I could just have walked in and viewed them “for free” (although my tax dollars are supporting UF) and now I need to apply for someone’s permission.

This reeks of academic elitism in its worst form. In the Old Testament accounts of the Israelites, their priests, and the tabernacle, only the high priests were granted access to the inner chambers of the tabernacle. In like manner, the state of our academics is becoming such that the general population is not only suffering from a vast gap of understanding and knowledge between them and the learned: they are now being physically denied access to that knowledge! This must change!

Religious & Political Bias In Popular History & Archaeology

The academic fields of archaeology and history have become tainted with religious and political ideologies. I see indications of this quite often on the History Channel, where programs often air that are based on places and events of the Bible. Topics such as Noah’s flood, the parting of the Red Sea, the Ark of the Covenant, Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, and the apocalyptic books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation have all been topics from the Bible treated as if they had some real-world meaning instead of being religious-based stories. Where is the independent academic research that refuses to make assumptions? Even the idea that one would choose a Biblical topic for research is, to me, an act of academic bias. For example, why do people seem to assume that all of the nationalities residing in what is present day Israel/Palestine were secondary to the Israelite/Jewish nations that were central to the Biblical narrative?

I’m not trying to pick on Judeo-Christianity. The same could be said for parts of the world where other religions sprang from. By focusing on these faiths and the concentration of people and events centered around just them, not only are questionable assertions within the religions being accepted without scrutiny; everything that was contemporary to those religions’ “histories” but outside of their direct influence gets essentially trivialized at best and either ignored or even unduly criticized at worst.

I have long held the view, right or wrong, that humanity has traditionally structured its societies in small villages, around extended families/clans. Even when there has been a kingdom or empire supposedly running things from afar, the real predominant human condition has usually been (until the recent technological revolution) people living in small communities in extended family units, working together to try to survive (see the movie Apocalypto). Those at least popularizing history seem to fall into the trap that small communities of the past were only legitimate subjects of study insofar as how they reflected the presence of the macro-governing structure (such as empire, kingdom, republic, theocracy). What I maintain is that communities, when confronted with a change in the outer political/religious structure, will tend to simply convert their expressed allegiances to the new imposed authority structure without substantially changing the way things run within the community. So a sixteenth-century European community that was Catholic suddenly comes under the rule of a prince who decides that he is a Lutheran. In that situation, such a community would often switch over in a wholesale manner to Protestantism (and back to Catholicism if a ruler loyal to Rome came into power). While going about their business pretty much the same as before.

It is easier (and lazier) for a scholar to take religious scriptures and old historic documents and create a history of an area from those without regard to what was really going on beneath the surface veneer of “official history” within the much more complicated, diverse, and spread-out societies underlying it. But people in general want things simplified, and objective academic investigation usually goes in the opposite direction. So instead of getting a picture about how things really were in the past, we’ll probably continue to get storybook narratives based on political ideologies and religious doctrines.