The inevitable rise of the pathologists

The famous Russian theoretical physicist Lev Landau evaluated scientists and their research by their impact according to the "Landau categories". While this is well known and its description can be found on the internet I was told many years ago that he came up with a further extension of this idea into a colourful analogy, and unfortunately I can not find any reference to this, so as far as I know it may have been an invention of the person who told this to me whose identity I have long forgotten. In this picture scientists and their works can be divided into three categories, brick makers, house builders and pathologists. Brick makers, driven purely by curiosity, create new fundamental concepts, that form elements of structure, bricks, windows, window frames, door handles etc... They wander around making these, leaving them in random heaps. The house builders look through these piles left by the brick makers and figure out how to build houses from them. The pathologists then take over the houses and live in them and only contribute to the structure of the houses by occasionally damaging them. The pathologists take all credit for the building of the houses, as falsely convincing others of their merit is their skill. With time the power and influence and prevalence of the pathologists comes to dominate with thermodynamic inevitability. I was reminded of this reading a book I picked up in an airport "Talk like TED". I thought it could possible have some good public speaking tips, as the TED talk style seems to work. While there was some good advice, it was drowned in a sea of the most extreme, to the point of self parody, laugh out loud jingoistic nonsense and even obvious pseudoneuroscience. Ultimately I could see that the book, indirectly, described exactly what has gone wrong with the TED talk series, and how this has happened. As originally conceived the TED series (Technology Entertainment Design) was a great format for people who were real experts in something to give very entertaining short talks on a general level about the real something they knew about and these talks were disseminated over the Internet through a very well designed website. Up until about 2009 this worked well, with several very interesting talks full of real information by brilliant people. Then the pathologists started to seep in and take over and it started to decay to the point where by about 2012 they had become vacuous pseudoscience filled parodies of themselves delivered by mostly "motivational speakers". The book breathlessly described the speaking styles and the messages of the very most vacuous TED talks I remember seeing, and how riveting their, as was clear to me, non-messages were. It described as success what I saw as the ultimate failure of the TED talks. When success is measured purely by the extent to which excitement is triggered in the audience of rich celebrities and other powerful people who paid thousands of dollars to be in the audience, who have no knowledge of the subject, victory is assured to the pathologists. Amazing ignorant people without the constraint of conveying actual factual information is much easier; those hobbled by sticking to this constraint will be unable to compete. Sadly the TED talks are but a microcosm of what has occurred across science in the past 50 years. Originally the merits of the brick makers was understood and respected and the house builders led the scientific endeavour. From the 50s until the beginning of the 80s science institutes had many scientists and many technicians and secretaries to support them and very few administrators at the top, maybe 2 or 3 for an entire institute, and all they did was ensured that scientists had access to the resources that they needed. Then the pathologists started to move in, with strategic planning, tactical research thrusts, key areas to chase that they did not realize were only buzzwords and hired more like themselves. Now research institutes have fewer scientists, virtually no support staff and huge numbers of administrators involved in "strategic planning" "business incubation" "collaboration management". The scientific endeavour now revolves around grant application with staff hired to help write these. The demands of grant application increase with longer more intricate applications, and, to add insult to injury, a demand for sections of the grant applications to be focused around the meaningless buzzwords of the pathologists who now control the distribution of funding. The policy makers in turn no longer know the difference between buzzwords and real science and think the buzzwords are the actual science. Brick makers can not survive beyond the post doctoral fellowship in the current environment, while a few can be protected for a short time by some of the remaining house builders the dedication of being able to focus on a tiny area of research for decades needed to really come up with truly novel house components becomes impossible. The house builders thus fight a losing battle with an ever-depleting supply of new house parts as they watch the pathologists increase in power status and prestige and ultimately gain control over them. All that can be done is to try to remain a house builder, try to create a safe space for brick makers, while taking on the outer veneer of a pathologist creating a pocket of resistance. But is it possible to fight the pull of the dark side and not wake up one morning to realize that you have become a pathologist yourself? Are we fighting against inevitable thermodynamic decay? Chillingly what has happened in science, in turn, represents a microcosm of our current global society. The rise of populist political parties in Europe, the Brexit victory, and The rise of Donald Trump represent victory of the fact free politics of the pathologists. The best hope for science and, in turn, society (I think we can safely give up on the TED talks) maybe be to create small pockets of resistance where house builders protecting brick makers might survive the ultimate total implosion that the pathologists will inevitably bring about once they gain complete control. So realize the situation, stay true to reality, and use all your energy to create such pockets of resistance. Let's see what happens...

My Wikipedia vandalism metasthesized: how I put Avars on Novaya Zemlya in a Tom Clancy novel.

About ten years ago Wikipedia was still something new and the rigorous policing mechanisms that are now present were not in place. What is known as "Wiki vandalism" was very common: people entering absurd false facts into articles to see what would happen. Usually these were done to very popular sites and were usually quite obvious, sophomoric and usually extremely obscene; their half-lives could usually be measured in hours. I thought though, what would happen if someone put in something in a relatively obscure corner of wikipedia, something that, while obviously absurd to anyone knowledgeable on the subject, would be subtle enough to be absorbed by someone not paying attention, or thinking "well since it is in wikipedia and not challenged...". So I looked around and found my target: the page on the russian arctic islands of Novaya Zemlya. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Zemlya

Famous for the nuclear testing that was carried out there, and not much else apart from being a desolate arctic wasteland, at the time the article mentioned that it was inhabited by about 100 nenetses who subsisted on fishing and sealing. In the decade since the article has been edited to state the nenetses population has been removed, who knows? So the sentence. "The indigenous population consists of about 100 Nenetses who subsist mainly on fishing, trapping and seal hunting" I edited to read "The indigenous population consists of about 100 Nenetses who subsist on fishing trapping and seal hunting and 50 Avars who subsist on polar bear husbandry". Avars are a central asian people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avars_(Caucasus)  who used to inhabit what is now Hungary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonian_Avars  So I put 50 of these central asian people in an arctic tundra island herding polar bears. I just left it there and watched what happened. It was very easy to track its spread to other websites as any google search of "avars" + "Novaya Zemlya" was, well, highly unlikely to yield anything not related to my vandalism. This remained unchanged for many months and several sites mostly calling themselves atlases that mirror geographic information from Wikipedia copied it over. About 6-8 months later the reference to polar bear husbandry was removed from the original wikipedia site, but remained on many of the mirror atlases. I even saw a comment on one of the mirror atlases saying "looking at atlases on the web with my son and I came across this fascinating information about a people on an arctic island who live off polar bear husbandry, the things you learn from the web!". The information about Avars remained much longer, several years. This false fact made its way onto the website of an anti-nuclear weapons campaign group, where they mentioned the nuclear testing on Novaya Zemlya and the suffering of the Nenetses and Avars who lived there. So now my apocryophal polar bear herding Avars of Novaya Zemlya were now suffering radiation poisoning. This website seems to have now been taken down. Later, on the original wikipedia page my statement of Avars living on Novaya Zemlya was added "[citation needed]" and it remained like this for several years. I was tempted at the time to add a complementary vandalism to the page about the caucasian avars about a group moved to a gulag on Novaya Zemlya in a horrible atrocity by Stalin and having both vandalisms cite each other, but I thought this might trigger the webs defence mechanism more than mask my vandalism so I just left it... Quite recently the page was completely changed and all references to Avars removed from the main text. The atlas sites that mirrored the info also seem to have been edited, with one exception that I could find where it still lives on, this blog here: http://vincijesus.blogspot.fi/2008/03/novaya-zemlya.html  On the original Wikipedia page, however, reference to the final discovery and purge of my vandalism remains on the talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ANovaya_Zemlya#Avars.3F where they suspect that the source is a Tom Clancy novel. Sure enough, its there in Tom Clancys "Dead or Alive" but its him who got his information from ME not the other way around! In the middle of page 346 one reads "Novaya Zemlya was indeed hell on earth, according to the last census the island was home to 2500 people, mostly Nenetses and Avarsliving in the Belushya Guba settlement." So my wiki vandalism metasthesized and has thus been immortalized! 

Scientific ethics and addiction

I will post two posts today, as the first post is a bit heavy and dark, I post something lighter afterwards. An article appeared this week on my facebook feed that moved me, and made me think deeply in a more profound way than I can remember anything that has appeared there before: http://theweek.com/articles/541564/how-american-opiate-epidemic-started-by-pharmaceutical-company

Read this article, to the end. Let is sink in...

The sudden and devastating opiate addiction epidemic in the rural USA that has directly led to the deaths of thousands, destroyed the lives of an order of magnitude more and laid waste to countless rural communities has a single source: the aggressive marketing of the legal medication OxyContin by Purdue Pharma. OxyContin is an opiate, the family of drugs of based on a similar molecular shape that all target the same mechanism; they only differ in strength of effect and time of onset. addiction to one is addiction to another, as addiction sets in the natural tendency is towards the faster acting forms ultimately leading to firect injection of heroin. 

For me two issues emerge here: 1) What scientific ethics should really be about and 2) Addiction as a phenomenon beyond physical drug molecules and how our economic system provides the highest incentive for triggering it through one means or another. Discussions around "scientific ethics" are usually focussed elsewhere, sometimes around legitimate issues of animal suffering, but often around frustratingly meaningless metaphysical issues that only make sense to someone with no understanding of the science whatsoever: embryonic stem cells, genetic modification, chimera species etc... Here is the real issue staring us in the face of science being used for evil that safeguards have failed to stop. This can not be passed off as a purely business decision, OxyContin was developed and tested as a new opiate drug molecule, and its addictive potential downplayed before being passed on the the salesmen who marketed it aggressively to doctors who were sought out based on their tendency to overprescribe medication, to the doctors who accepted kickbacks for making the prescriptions. The scientists who developed the molecule are no more or less cogs in the wheel of this catastrophe than any of the other actors involved, all just individuals trying to get their financial bonuses. 

But, sadly, is this not just a microcosm of what is a central part of the engine of our economic system? Addiction is not just about physical molecules that trigger a need for the reward provided by consumption of more of the same, while tolerance reduces the effect of a specific dose; the non-physical can trigger the same. Gambling is known to trigger a very similar set of reward centers to cocaine. In an experiment rats were given one of two types of food dispensers one dispensing a food pellet with every third push from the rats nose, and the other having a one in three chance of dispensing a pellet with each push. In the first case the rat learned that three pushes means food and it went about its life normally otherwise. In the latter case the rat fell into a pathological behaviour of compulsively continually pushing the dispenser: the uncertainty created a reward trigger led to addiction; the essence of gambling addiction had been isolated. Video games are designed specifically to pace the frequency and level of psychological rewards to maximize addiction. If one looks even more broadly the clearest route to wealth is the creation of a "need" in a large group of consumers that was not there before, is not success in our current economic system based on, in some way or another, the creation of an addiction reaction in others?   

What Ends Well Begins Well

So this is my first attempt at blogging, releasing the inner thoughts of my mind carelessly to all of humanity. So what thing that I think highly profound that someday I will look back on with profound embarrassment at its oversimplicity will I begin with. There is this thought in my mind. The idea that understanding is no longer important and how wrong this is. This all begins with my working for industry at the beginning of the millenium. I was hired to work on a project that was killed the moment I arrived, but the idea of the project was to combine massive amounts of thoughtless experiment with various artificial intelligence and search algorithms with the idea that the answer would be produced purely by massive data plus AI. With a level of hubris common to aspiring middle managers in large corporations he stated "Understanding is obsolete!" . More broadly this is referred to as big data. This is typical of the human urge to take short cuts, to look for a simple answer based on buzzards that leads to rapid rise in a meaningless heirarchy. In truth this represents the large computer/experimental apparatus small brain approach. the truth, the hard path that really leads to progress is the small computer/experimental apparatus large brain approach: trying to really understand what is happening. To do this means working from the ground up, using what Daniel Dennett refers to as the "Cranes rather than skyhooks" approach building an emergent picture from simple models from the ground up that eventually connects to other emergent pictures. to use computational work with real thinking behind to really understand what is happening, and this be able to control and rationally design. This is, though, just a microcosm of how life is in general, the hard approach, really figuring things out, being so much more rewarding than the easy answer, that only temporarily impresses those playing the same easy game.