Even in Kyoto

There's a story from Seattle in 1971 during one of the Boeing boom-bust cycles where some guys put up a billboard reading "Will the last person leaving SEATTLE - turn out the lights."

One of those cultural memories that sticks with a person, especially if one grows up with a parent working for Boeing.

Clearly there are still plenty of people living on the West Coast; Seattle has found means for economic survival.

I'm thinking about this story relative to demographic trends in the northeastern United States, which generally show population declines here, while cities in the west have been experiencing population booms and the accompanying issues only mildly disrupted by the pandemic.

I'm thinking about it all in the context of passive reporting, where people report on trends without necessarily talking about what, if anything, to do about them.

I can understand the inclination to abdicate responsibility for that aspect of reporting, and yet. And yet.

If we refuse to put value judgments on what's happening, aren't we allowing them to happen?

Messages of hope spur action more readily than messages of despair.

Can those who stay behind and stick things through emerge transformed in positive ways? I would ask this of small town residents anywhere, as much as of people in the northeastern United States.

Seattle certainly hasn't stopped trying.

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I saw this again today in an article about mental health crises among youth, a topic I spent a lot of time discussing with my cousin on Saturday. We're both deep in the trenches on that one. The news report notes increased rates; uncertainty about causes; shortages of resources.

I suppose that in the modern media landscape, negative stories still sell best.

A thing that is occupying my thoughts recently comes from hearing about my father's spiritual journey over the years. Somewhere around 15-20 years ago, he became interested in thinking about what is termed the "Universe Story," which is centered in thinking about the miracle of human life in the context of humanity's current understanding of the origins of the universe, our solar system, and our planet. If you look back in history, this is something that a number of religious traditions have grappled with over time - think Galileo and Catholicism, for one (what I'm most familiar with due to being raised Catholic).

This is a thing that often intersects with what I tend to phrase as my "existential crisis" - coming to terms with the limits of human understanding of our own existence. Reductionism and other scientific approaches really only get us so far, but we can still know a few things from them. In particular, part of being a living organism is exchange with our surrounding environment: we breathe in oxygen-rich air, and that oxygen becomes a part of us for some period of time. Eventually, much of it is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The same is true of the elements we eat: we hold on to individual elements for different periods of time, but eventually they are released back into our surroundings.

From this perspective, we also wind up hitting against that philosophical question about whether an object is still the same thing if all of its individual parts have been replaced over time.

It's that time component that's capturing me at the moment. On the one hand, our lives seem so short, for all that many stages of life wind up being uncomfortable. On the other hand, the perspective that the Earth is our ancestors has a lot of merit in my book - look across religious beliefs, and this theme is repeated.

I don't know if there's comfort for other people in considering death as a form of time travel, but given its eventual inevitability, perhaps it's a small comfort at times.

My attention span for subjects in cognitive psychology has traditionally been limited by impatience over heuristics. It's an arena where humans can't help being subjective, and it's easy to get tangled up in this subjectivity to a point where one becomes blind to alternative ideas and evidence and ways of thinking. Kahneman is continuing to do a sensitive job of covering important gaps in how humans think about, interpret, and respond to the world around us. I have a feeling that I will wind up pulling out some excerpts to savor further.

In the meantime, here are two things that popped up yesterday, both touching on how scientific thinking can be transformed over time. They highlighted one of the most important things that Kahneman has done, from a philosophical standpoing: when Kahneman has encountered resistance to his ideas and evidence, he has made a concerted effort to work with those who have an opposing viewpoint to figure out how to reconcile different perspectives.

In contrast, for years now I have been observing some Huge Arguments in sociobiology that have largely just exasperated me, over the evolution of eusociality. At one point, a couple of years into graduate school, a group of us got together as a small class to work through the relevant ideas and math for the sake of understanding group selection. It wasn't easy, but with the help of a couple key people, we reached a point where we all felt like we had a good sense of the mechanics, even if we hadn't reached the stage where we had ideas on how to structure and test hypotheses on the subject. That was sufficient for me; my main interests lie elsewhere.

But the evolution of eusociality is obviously a Big Question for sociobiologists, so of course some prominent figures in the field have had longstanding interest in being involved in answering the question. When Wilson and Nowak's paper appeared in the journal Nature in 2010, it created quite a stir, but as this blog post so aptly puts it, "Reading the protracted back and forth between the challengers and defenders of kin selection is like watching a tennis match in which the ball abruptly changes shape, size, colour, and direction every time it crosses over the net."

In this case, there may be hope in the long term, but the tennis match has left its mark on interpersonal relations in the field of sociobiology, which I think is something of a shame.

Yesterday I also encountered a piece about an emeritus faculty member from Berkeley, Marian Diamond, who is the subject of a new documentary because of her influential career spent studying the human brain. The brief video snippet in the article also provides commentary about how Diamond faced resistance to the ideas she was interested in pursuing. But it sounds like a worthwhile documentary project in that she was eventually able to convince people that longstanding notions about how the brain works were wrong. I also like her perspective on five things that promote brain health (diet, exercise, challenge, newness, love). To some extent, this all actually wraps back around to Kahneman, who in the most recent chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow has pointed out that humans do a much better job of generalizing from anecdata than we do of applying general statistical information to specific cases. It will be easier to follow Diamond's story than it would be to follow a history of neuroscience.