Hits by Chance

A few years ago I saw Janis Ian perform at Club Passim in Cambridge with my wife. Janis introduced a biopic-inspired tune with the insight that people are not really all that worthy of public spectacle. Celebrities are not the basis for celebration. It's the body of work that inspires and gives life to the individual gifts we contribute to a collective truth called civilization. I've always found ideas more interesting to discuss than people. Some truly redemptive treasures come from some pretty loathsome creatures.

I don't think that makes me a dweeb or misanthrope. But it does bring great joy to the imaginative and experiential side of life -- less so to the material and tangible forms that define "the real world" in a person-centric model. Me? I'd rather float a concept than drop a name any day.

In that spirit I have come to praise the brainy, provocative journalism of Sharon Begley. I've never seen her subjective self in the interview seat, on a conference panel, or an Amazon alert at the bottom of my convolutional shopping cart. I've never sought out a grouping of topics or a collection of resources with her running keyword interference as a vaunted opening into an otherwise flimsy or ill-formed framework for describing our mental conditions, cognitive functions, and neural circuitries. Her smarts are not about shining the brightest but about fusing together the patterns and relationships that occur in the real experiential world -- mapping the machinery of neuroscience to the actions we take and outcomes we seek. It's 10 mg of Ritalin and a glass of warm milk.

A recent piece she ran in Newsweek called Why Everything You Hear About Medicine is Wrong was a splendid profile of a myth-busting gadfly of big pharma fears and conceits named John Ionnidis, Chief of Stanford University's Prevention Research Center. The piece shows how reducing every chemical redirect to pill form provides a blank check for making unsubstantiated medical claims:

Ioannidis’s first targets were shoddy statistics used in early genome studies. Scientists would test one or a few genes at a time for links to virtually every disease they could think of. That just about ensured they would get “hits” by chance alone. When he began marching through the genetics literature, it was like Sherman laying waste to Georgia: most of these candidate genes could not be verified.

Her point (Begley channeling Ionnidis) is that the circle of common sense that surrounds most medical consumers is much smaller than a universal willingness to believe a cause-and-effect relationship every time a a sponsor study/tester pierces the genome dartboard. All it takes is a hypothetical outcome. It doesn't hurt to test approved drugs for other uses. Boing! Again, it's hits by chance. Genome-testing industry? Meet search engine optimization:

By testing an approved drug for other uses, they get hits by chance, “and doctors use that as the basis to prescribe the drug for this new use. I think that’s wrong.” Even when a claim is disproved, it hangs around like a deadbeat renter you can’t evict. Years after the claim that vitamin E prevents heart disease had been overturned, half the scientific papers mentioning it cast it as true, Ioannidis found in 2007.

What ever comes of health care reform, debt ceiling stand-offs, or error-prone medical research, we owe a debt to empirical idealists like Ionnidis for removing our evidentiary blinders and Sharon Begley for her rigor, skepticism, and her regular filing of routine victories over conventional thinking.

Birth of the River Arts Collaborative

I've been reading James Mauro's take on the 1939 New York World's Fair -- my favorite historic crossroad between past and future. Twilight at the World of Tomorrow chronicles  the clairvoyant visions and grandiosity of scale. The fair as not just a carnival or a fish bowl but frankly the best of what the Greatest Generation dared to dream of for our parents' time.

Sure, one sobering underside is the naiveté fueling the hopes pinned against the darkening skies of World War and the Death Camps. A more contemporary irony is that this colossal undertaking was all done within the time frame that it takes in our time for a broken commuter rail escalator to go out to bid.

I mention the book because Albert Einstein has a cameo as the flakey genius-philosopher who idles away sleepy Sunday afternoons off the North Fork of Long Island in a moribund and motor-free boat where he can bob to the waves of the LI Sound until the tides determine his return to shore.

That pretty much sums up how I feel about the Book Mill in Montague. Like the bumper sticker says, it's a place with books you don't need in a place you can't find. One finds new excuses to drift back there once this place discovers you. The Book Mill is a haven for creating lazy, lilting vacuums of time to slip away on the back channels of the Connecticut Riverbed. It's there at the fork of the Saw Mill cascade is where some paper mill kingpin planted his own early 19th century vision of a prosperous future.

When I dream in my wi-fi sofa I don't see dollar signs but ...

* an enchanting sanctuary

* an expansive nesting bed of solitude and exploration

* a place for teaching to the insatiable learners of Pioneer Valley

That was my groove path when I approached Louise Minks, the local painter, teacher, and owner of the Millworks Studio -- one of the retail spaces within the Bookmill complex. Louise told me about an ongoing interest by several artisans to revive the vacant space next door with a collaborative of painters and crafts-makers. I said that suits me fine. My classes would happen after shopping hours anyway.

I didn't let on straight away but the proposition I was making extends beyond self-interest. That meant I'd be willing to match my rent commitment with assuming my shopkeeper share during the monthly retail shift. The gesture was not meant to be sweeping or dramatic; just a modest reserve of generosity that bubbles up from the gratitude of having the chance to work with a talented group in a captivating space. I'm not sure if that's how fortunes get made but certainly that's pretty solid footing for how sustainable partnerships come about -- even communities.

What has struck me in terms of the group's formative stages in our first several meetings is how essential it is to show up in the actual space. An email-only presence gives voice to speculations that dwell on the specifics of outcomes as detailed as they seem improbable. They flirt with the temptations of rock-solid business proposals and the contingency plans of a more elaborate and weightier commitment.

The more immediate concern is getting our first year off the ground -- not putting out every potential fire , or worse, a prepared response to our future successes! Heaven forbid we stir too much interest in this enticing, and not intemperate undertaking.

This afternoon we named ourselves the River Arts Collaborative, based on input from Terri Fain. Montague artists Christine Mero and Jill Bromberg agreed to serve as co-chairs for the first year. Susan Essig recorded the notes. Louise and I rounded out the circle. Together we formed a compelling blend of due process and consensus-building with simple intuition and open communication. A nucleus is forming.

Einstein, by the way, refused to wear a life jacket. Apparently his seaside wayfarings were buoyant enough to resist them.

Red Flag Conditions

What are some smoking guns? Where does our sniff test take us? Here are three red flags that are cited by Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead, and Sidney Finkelstein in their piece entitled Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions in a 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review. The occasion? Here are some common lapses in the calculations of misinformation providers:

1. Inappropriate self-interest — The limits of our own personal experience prevent us from seeing how our actions impact others and their interpretations for what we do. Self-preservation erodes our ability to see our own biases, even when we petition on behalf of others. It is not by accident but design that in most high level negotiations we hire brokers to do our bidding. But when personal loyalties blind us to impartial observation we lose the confidence of our professional peers – especially those group leaders who see that the “greater good” should prevail above the privileged concerns of the well-connected.


2. Distorting attachments – Personalizing adversity is an honest, authentic, and entirely human response to our own vulnerability. It is also nearly always unprofessional. Whenever we experience an emotionally-charged event we are prone to raising the specter of that same threat in the future. Holding on to past grievances can often lead to future blunders. Instead of looking at the big picture or taking the long view our search target fixates on some slight or wound inflicted from a feuding enemy.


3. Misleading memories — It’s a standard assumption that someone with a track record of success is a better risk to build on that success than someone with less experience or a mixed record. The red flag rationale argues that success can breed overconfidence. If prior decisions turned out well our target is blinded to key differences as conditions change and new conflicts arise. If the rewards of past smear campaigns eclipse the downsides those approaches are likelier to repeat – if not the successes.

 

The Tyranny of the Immediacy of Now

I was traipsing through the NYT Magazine's best ideas of the year edition and happened on  "The 2000s were a great decade." It's a desultory oxide of a rust-gathering irony that an article designed to elevate perspective-gathering contradicts its own sense-making. The 00s? The uh-ohs? What opinion are we rounding off to which decimal place?

Here in world-is-flat matter-of-factness,  the current century is shrink-wrapped  as bite-sized summaries. They're easier to maintain, cheaper to make, and grant us permission to close the books on the nameless decade.

Remember that decade? It begins with a Y2K bridge to the 21st Century and ends in the rear view yearning for some fantasy period -- lost innocence for sure. Was it a lost ... century? Really? What generation is self-important enough to warrant that responsibility? The naming rights are still open bid.

The New York Times Magazine article maintains that the drumbeat of boom-bust recyclables delivers us passenger/audience dwellers within the awareness range of the 24 X 7 squad car dispatchers. The static in our ear buds is tuned to a closed circuit of finites, futilities and fatalisms:

"Two recessions. 9/11. Iraq. Afghanistan. You might think the last decade was among the worst in modern history. But according to the economist Charles Kenny, author of “Getting Better,” a forthcoming book on global development, you’d be wrong."

The passage moves on to echo Mr. Kenny's cheerful aggregates:

* Average worldwide income up 25%
* Cereal production outpaces 3rd world population growth by half
* Mortality rates from measles plummet 60%, from birth, 17%, and so on

The numbers shrug at our self-centered pessimism and smile on our civilizing progress. It's a greater time to be alive than us grousing romantics might concede. Have we overstayed our welcome in the new century? Time to get on texting terms with the social media bureaucracy, right?

But where exactly does human progress part company with personal experience? It may be the time in human history where our own personal histories were severed from an abstraction of greater consequence to our lives. Encouraging factoids be damned. That was the moment we reached constant communications and the false and implicit assumption that "instantaneous" equals "understanding." It's a disservice to human potential and achievement that a reproducible world of zeros and ones can accurately portray and scale the sum of human experience in a pre-digitized form.

(One promising departure from our immediacy fixation is Google's NGram -- a byproduct of Google's literal assault on digitizing all things punctuated. Here in the 2.0-teens it's a little like the 1860s and we're seeing the dinosaurs in the headlights for the first time.)

The passing of the nameless decade is celebrated in the the pages of the current issue of BusinessWeek. A retrospective on the first ten years of  recorded Wikipedia history is a breathless reverie on how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill clocks a Wikipedia entry before the rig inferno burns out. Even this afternoon here comes the health status of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, one ER procedure after the same massacre claims six other victims.

Conversely the fluid and bending fashions of Wikipedia's self-selecting editorial staff skews the importance of group pastimes far beyond their merit as cultural influences:

"Popular cultural looms large. The entry for the game Halo, for example, is significantly longer than the one for the Protestant Reformation." 

This kind of self-identity cuts us off from divinations that run deeper than any religious sect -- let alone gaming application.The tyranny of the immediacy of now there is no longer a grace period or a honeymoon or the requisite down time to take in  the tumult of disruptive events and accord them the proportion, connectedness, and possible redress they deserve.

Thinking on our feet is important for remaining on them. It's our grace under pressure when we refuse to be overcome by events not of our design or intention. But running to a rescue or maintaining serene calm in the most perfect of storms doesn't confer a clear understanding of the chaos we are wrestling with in these volatile and eruptive moments. Likewise our poise does not impart a deeper connection to why these catastrophic cinders rain down on us, no matter how laudable the march or modest the parade.

Faith is a partial answer. Much of this is beyond us. But the missing human ingredient in all of this is the biggest picture. It is the deeper pre-digitized history that places us in the historical context that we once called our calling or destiny. This biggest picture shows us that our own blood is no bloodier, our own adversities are no mightier, and our own bruised hopes are no less romantic than our forebears.

This is the slow resolve of wondering off the network reservation and letting in the days. These are the days that we share freely with our predecessors and the unborn. The limits to the biggest picture are not measured in lifetimes or pixels but in the ancestral community of living memories.

The Tyranny of the Immediacy of Now

I was traipsing through the NYT Magazine's best ideas of the year edition and happened on  "The 2000s were a great decade." It's a desultory oxide of a rust-gathering irony that an article designed to elevate perspective-gathering contradicts its own sense-making. The 00s? The uh-ohs? What opinion are we rounding off to which decimal place?

Here in world-is-flat matter-of-factness,  the current century is shrink-wrapped  as bite-sized summaries. They're easier to maintain, cheaper to make, and grant us permission to close the books on the nameless decade.

Remember that decade? It begins with a Y2K bridge to the 21st Century and ends in the rear view yearning for some fantasy period -- lost innocence for sure. Was it a lost ... century? Really? What generation is self-important enough to warrant that responsibility? The naming rights are still open bid.

The New York Times Magazine article maintains that the drumbeat of boom-bust recyclables delivers us passenger/audience dwellers within the awareness range of the 24 X 7 squad car dispatchers. The static in our ear buds is tuned to a closed circuit of finites, futilities and fatalisms:

"Two recessions. 9/11. Iraq. Afghanistan. You might think the last decade was among the worst in modern history. But according to the economist Charles Kenny, author of “Getting Better,” a forthcoming book on global development, you’d be wrong."

The passage moves on to echo Mr. Kenny's cheerful aggregates:

* Average worldwide income up 25%
* Cereal production outpaces 3rd world population growth by half
* Mortality rates from measles plummet 60%, from birth, 17%, and so on

The numbers shrug at our self-centered pessimism and smile on our civilizing progress. It's a greater time to be alive than us grousing romantics might concede. Have we overstayed our welcome in the new century? Time to get on texting terms with the social media bureaucracy, right?

But where exactly does human progress part company with personal experience? It may be the time in human history where our own personal histories were severed from an abstraction of greater consequence to our lives. Encouraging factoids be damned. That was the moment we reached constant communications and the false and implicit assumption that "instantaneous" equals "understanding." It's a disservice to human potential and achievement that a reproducible world of zeros and ones can accurately portray and scale the sum of human experience in a pre-digitized form.

(One promising departure from our immediacy fixation is Google's NGram -- a byproduct of Google's literal assault on digitizing all things punctuated. Here in the 2.0-teens it's a little like the 1860s and we're seeing the dinosaurs in the headlights for the first time.)

The passing of the nameless decade is celebrated in the the pages of the current issue of BusinessWeek. A retrospective on the first ten years of  recorded Wikipedia history is a breathless reverie on how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill clocks a Wikipedia entry before the rig inferno burns out. Even this afternoon here comes the health status of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, one ER procedure after the same massacre claims six other victims.

Conversely the fluid and bending fashions of Wikipedia's self-selecting editorial staff skews the importance of group pastimes far beyond their merit as cultural influences:

"Popular cultural looms large. The entry for the game Halo, for example, is significantly longer than the one for the Protestant Reformation." 

This kind of self-identity cuts us off from divinations that run deeper than any religious sect -- let alone gaming application.The tyranny of the immediacy of now there is no longer a grace period or a honeymoon or the requisite down time to take in  the tumult of disruptive events and accord them the proportion, connectedness, and possible redress they deserve.

Thinking on our feet is important for remaining on them. It's our grace under pressure when we refuse to be overcome by events not of our design or intention. But running to a rescue or maintaining serene calm in the most perfect of storms doesn't confer a clear understanding of the chaos we are wrestling with in these volatile and eruptive moments. Likewise our poise does not impart a deeper connection to why these catastrophic cinders rain down on us, no matter how laudable the march or modest the parade.

Faith is a partial answer. Much of this is beyond us. But the missing human ingredient in all of this is the biggest picture. It is the deeper pre-digitized history that places us in the historical context that we once called our calling or destiny. This biggest picture shows us that our own blood is no bloodier, our own adversities are no mightier, and our own bruised hopes are no less romantic than our forebears.

This is the slow resolve of wondering off the network reservation and letting in the days. These are the days that we share freely with our predecessors and the unborn. The limits to the biggest picture are not measured in lifetimes or pixels but in the ancestral community of living memories.