The Doomed Mouse Utopia

A friend sent this interesting article around:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-doomed-mouse-utopia-that-inspired-the-rats-of-nimh?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Fascinating, it got me to thinking (careful now:)

Rats are a prolific and durable species in nature. Why did the rats in the box "with all needs met" become extinct? First of all, who says all needs were met? The scientists conducting the study? "Models under test" are approximations of reality based on best guesses as to what reality is. Since we don't know where the boundaries of reality end (do they end?), we can't even calculate the degree of compression in any model under test. This problem goes mostly unrecognized (god is dead, science is the new religion), and is one of the core reasons modern man is intractably hubristic. Hunter gatherers weren't hubristic, they lived in fear of the gods. But now god is dead. What was missing in the rat box was an unbounded ecosystem. Unbounded means unknown, it cannot be modeled.

What are the implications for post industrial man? Have we effectively put ourselves in a bounded box? If so is the only hope of our species survival an escape to Mars? An escape to an infinitely smaller ecology even compared to our very damaged ecology? Oh, but that's OK, we'll just engineer a new ecology, and it will be better because we will be in control of it.

If we have put ourselves in a bounded box, are the walls constructed of the hubristic assumption all things are knowable?

Perhaps we are focused on the wrong things. Insects and sharks are a good example of this problem, a "frame of apprehension" problem, or how we are incapable of seeing the bigger picture. For example, we know grass grows, but we cannot just sit down and watch it grow. The real time experience of watching grass grow is beyond the frame of apprehension.

Back to sharks and insects. How many humans die on average in a year from insect bites? 600,000. How many die in an average year from shark attacks? 10. But when there is a single shark attack we close beaches, put patrol boats in the water, discuss what has to be done to stay safe, and put nets in the water to protect swimmers. Meanwhile we are relatively nonplussed by the many orders of magnitude greater likelihood of death by insect. Call the exterminator, that will fix it. Be careful hiking in the woods. If we didn't do either of those things would the average yearly death rate from insect bites even double?

Bounded box studies have an inherent hubristic stupidity built into them, the box walls themselves are the metaphors of that hubristic stupidity. But we can't see this, it is beyond the frame of apprehension.

The philosophical problem with science

A friend wrote:

Better read up your history first…for the macrobiotic organic eating natives.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/impact-european-diseases-native-americans

smallpox etc. never calmed down in Europe either…waves of plagues were the norm…anybody from Egypt?  

the placebo effect is real because it’s measurable but the death rate of disease is also real and measurable.  trying to put some kind of questioning equivalence there to go against vaccines is a losing historical proposition.  

anyway, to answer your questions about vaccine effects and mechanicals and psychological , i’m sure there is a boat load of real scientific papers that quantify it…over the last hundred years. 

My response:

Catching up on mail, having just read this one the first thing I'd like to say is this is not history, it's speculation with a lot of disagreement and debate among the scholars who study this. Which variation of the debate is the actual history? We don't know and we likely never will. But it's difficult for humans to say I don't know and leave it at that. So we have theories. Nothing wrong with theories except they tend to become "fact" because we hate not knowing. Not knowing means we cannot adequately defend ourselves against death. The predominant myth science is infused with is we can know everything, if not now, eventually. A central metaphor of science is "in search of the God particle".

I agree however that it's very likely Europeans arriving in the americas were carrying the diseases of civilization they had developed immunity to, and these diseases were more virulant than the diseases the native americans had developed immunity to. That is a logical conclusion based on the question: "why didn't the native american's wipe out the Europeans with their diseases instead? The Europeans were not "virgin tinder" for those earlier, pre civilization diseases, they had immunity to those too.

The point Zack Bush and many others are making is the biological immune function is complicated in ways we are only beginning to understand. Hidden in "only beginning to understand" is, again, the search for the god particle, the point at which humans finally transcend nature completely.

It ain't gonna happen.

Meanwhile humans live longer as an accidental consequence of the most rudimentary form of technology, shelter from the elements. Based on what we know of the remaining centenarian cultures, longevity was a consequence of benign natural conditions, relative freedom from predatory assault, harsh weather, and difficult growing conditions. Technology has otherwise, within the context of longer life, reduced healthy life span significantly relative to the (now historical) pre-technological centenarians.

I'm not saying technology is "bad", I'm saying it's a double edged sword and we have not yet fully grasped that "problem" yet, much less began mitigating the effects of it.

Meanwhile the only way out is through, so we plunge ahead pushing current limits of tech, learning from mistakes as we go, using our species as the lab animals. The fundamental two problems with tech is it allows much more efficient access to resources, and as a consequence much greater population density, which creates a downward spiral in the ecology and in health. The dream of course (search for the god particle) is that we will find our way to "zero footprint".

That ain't gonna happen either.

The problem with vaccines will be the same problem of all tech, unintended negative consequences to health. We're headed toward genetic modification of our species. We didn't like GMO foods for obvious reasons (it destroys nutritional complexity for one), are we going to like GMO "us" any better? The blinded scientists will be clamoring for it.

Bush and the other "naturalists" are dreamers too. There will be, IMHO, no way out of the mess we are making of food sources and the ecology that sustains us. Except one, population collapses of large enough magnitude to "wake us up" (maybe, if we're lucky) to the "double edged" problem of tech.

Meanwhile it is now thought the 6th mass extinction began 100 years ago as a consequence of the industrial revolution. As Keith is fond of saying "it happens slowly then all at once". The primary impact on us mere biological humans of the great extinction so far is the exponential rise in so-called metabolic disease. A better term is diseases of poor nutrition. There's an as yet (mostly) invisible unintended consequence for you. Imagine that, the most technologically advanced civilizations so far...and the primary threat is bad food we created ourselves?

And this is a problem that dwarfs the threat of pandemics....so far. I feel it's very likely pandemics will catch up at some point (we won't be around to see it), and vaccines will play a role. Junk food, and now we'll have a junk immune system, as the unintended consequence of vaccines will be a destruction of the "nutritional complexity" of our innate organic immune functionality, which we still don't understand as we call it a system, as if it was a discrete anatomical system, which it is not. And in so doing have unconsciously minimized the complexity of it, in the same way we did (and still do) with food.

There is a philosophical problem with science that science is generally blind to. It is the fact that human intelligence is limited by brain size, just as it is in all species. And that intelligence is also bounded by survival instinct, just as it is in all species.  But we think we are above that limitation and technology proves the point. If that were true we wouldn't be making such a mess of things. Instinct predominates intelligence, and we do not operate with a functional understanding of that yet. There is a lot of work pointing in that direction (including Kahneman and Tversky and many others), perhaps we will get there yet. Imagine humans operating with a keen understanding of the limits of human intelligence. There is also a death instinct, according to Freud. That would be the one that does not allow us to see and comprehend the limits of human intelligence.

The Power of Narrative

 I've been thinking about the role of what I call "mechanicals and psychologicals" in the healing process. The placebo effect (psychologicals) fascinates me, which could be called the courage to get well, or the power of belief. Mechanicals are what happens in the absence of the placebo effect. This is what happens with an intervention to a person who is completely unaware that an intervention has taken place. AFAIK we don't study that, we only do placebo controlled double blind tests to find beneficial effects beyond placebo. I can't think of a way to do an ethical test of medical interventions in a person who remains completely unaware of it, so if that kind of thing has been done It's unlikely we would know about it.

Mechanicals trump psychologicals...the effect can be larger, sometimes by a lot. Thought experiment - give two study groups little white pills with the message "a great advance in medical science", one group gets a placebo and the other group a lethal dose of something. Yeah that doesn't end well for the latter group, and the placebo group feels better.

But at the margins the placebo effect can be larger than mildly negative mechanicals...the placebo effect is stronger than mildly negative mechanicals are negative. The most positive effect possible happens in the context of the sum of the placebo effect and effective mechanicals. But placebo controlled trials are currently only used to weed out ineffective mechanicals.

None of this is lost on BigP, which has studied the effect of placebo more than any other group. None of the drugs they have for the "metabolic conditions", which are all food borne, are particularly effective, and they generate huge profits. BigP has a lock on the narrative, they basically write the legislation around medical intervention, and etc etc.

So here is a fun fact, BigP is not required and does not do placebo controlled trials on vaccines. And the strength of the placebo effect varies according to the power of the narrative.

Consider the case where the intervention has neutral to even slightly negative mechanicals in the context of the most powerful health narrative to date. The narrative that says "we'll be free again, things will go back to normal, and absent this intervention this vile disease will never go away". And that narrative is fed to a population that has obeyed the rules and stayed "locked down" for a year.

And let's also note that solitary confinement is one of the worst things that can be done to human health, we are social creatures. It's a blend of negative mechanicals and negative psychologicals.

Let me also be clear I am not saying the mechanical effect of vaccines is ineffective or slightly negative. I'm simply saying we have no real way of knowing what it is in the absence of placebo controlled trials. The 95% effective narrative is certainly compelling, the one we desperately want to hear after being locked down for a year. But in scientific terms it is a slapdash narrative, and potentially disingenuous.

And the thing about widely and strongly held narratives is if one tries to pop that belief bubble you'll be lynched by a mob of believers. Trump is the perfect example as it is so easy for us social progressives to see. Half of the population continues to be mesmerized. The power of narrative and the placebo effect are essentially the same phenomena. But mechanicals still trump psychologicals, which makes "population control" a very sloppy science.

Is the primary role of government to protect and serve the body politic, or population control? Should we even care? Individually we have little control over the shifting of the tectonic social plates. These epocal shifts are largely the result of unconscious herd behavior. To think otherwise is delusional and even hubristic IMHO. But to think otherwise is also the dream that won't die, and the most powerful narrative of all.

Digressing for a bit, I prefer the terms social progressive and patriarchal over the terms liberal and conservative. These more common terms are nearly meaningless unless the word fiscal comes before, and they certainly don't describe the Trump phenomenon, making the narrative around Trump into a very blurry picture. Sociology and economics have been smushed into one thing. Socionomics? Hello Prechter.

Anyway. The measure of the degree of the true mechanical effect of vaccines is disallowed by a multi trillion $ industry that understands the power of narrative better than anyone, and controls related legislation.

Food for thought.

Zach Bush MD - The Innate Immune System

This post will be all Zack Bush, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. But I am going to make an unusual suggestion to only watch part of the second presentation.

Watch all of the introduction presentation here:

But watch only from the beginning where Bush is speaking to the end of the first interview with the Dupont scientist here:

(I am suggesting this because I find the interviews following the first to be less coherent and informational, and your time is valuable.)

Best Treatment for Obesity, Diabetes & Cancer

 Dr. Jason Fung MD, nephrologist (kidney specialist), covers a lot of ground in this very informative interview. Well worth your time.

How To Decrease the Risk of Developing Cancer

 

I like  the videos done by Plant Based Science London -- they are well done, brief, and to the point.

Why Your New Year’s Diet Is Doomed - NY Times

 I'm going to copy paste this article written by Mark Bittman because the NY Times is behind a paywall, and the topic is critically important.

Nearly all of us will fail at our annual round of New Year’s resolutions, which historically are led by eating better and losing weight.

But the struggle for your health is not a battle between you and the scale, or you and the brownies. Excessive weight is a symptom — not one of laziness, stupidity or a lack of discipline but of a food system that thrives on pushing junk. The struggle is really between you and the Big Food marketers that sell you that junk — their most profitable products — and politicians who enable them.

The war began in earnest in the second half of the 20th century with the development of what we now call ultra-processed foods: new creations that are stripped of nutrients and combined with sugars and artificial ingredients. These are products that, as the Brazilian scientist Carlos Monteiro and his colleagues say, contain ingredients that are “never or rarely used in kitchens.”

The development of these products wasn’t inevitable, and it certainly wasn’t “progress.” But it was made super-profitable by a combination of a surplus of grains, advanced manufacturing techniques, a retail system that made shelf life a higher priority than quality or nutrition, and a general failure to limit corporate consolidation. The dominance of ultra-processed foods took hold during the ’70s, when the gradual piling on of work and the resulting lack of personal time made real home cooking difficult or impossible for many people.

Now, more than half of our total calories come from ultra-processed foods, and our ancestors, no matter where they’re from, would not recognize our diet. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of calories consumed in snacks nearly doubled. We tend to blame fast-food restaurants for our poor eating habits, but much of what’s now consumed at home is ultra-processed food. The result has been an average weight gain for adults of more than 24 pounds between 1960 and 2002, and an epidemic of chronic disease.

In short, most of us are overweight, and losing that weight is so difficult because we’re set up to eat too much food that’s high in calories and bereft of nutrients. The new diet is believed to cause chronic disease, led by insulin resistance, which in turn causes Type 2 diabetes, a precursor to a variety of cardiovascular diseases.

Most people in the United States have at least one chronic disease (nearly half have two), and those diseases are responsible for about 70 percent of all deaths — more than 1.7 million per year. They’re not only our leading killers (Covid-19 pales by comparison); they’ve also shortened our average life span. Meanwhile, the dominant food corporations are happily spreading this deadly diet globally.

To say the deck is stacked against those trying to fight these trends is an understatement: Just as casinos are designed for gamblers to lose, the food system evolved to become a carefully engineered con to coerce us to eat the stuff that is at once most profitable for the food industry and worst for our health. There are winners and losers here.

The playbook for much of the junk-food marketing is similar to what the tobacco industry used for decades: advertising strategies focused on young people, a shirking of responsibility for poisoning entire populations, and an emphasis on individuals’ responsibility for their own health.

Unfortunately, ultra-processed foods aren’t as readily condemned as tobacco. While we know that nicotine is addictive and that cigarettes deliver a range of carcinogens, there are many ways (yet no single way) that the standard American diet increases the risk of other causes of premature death. The interactions among calorie intake, exercise, fat accumulation, insulin resistance and genetic background, along with other environmental factors that cause diet-related diseases (such as stress and generational poverty), are variable and complicated.

What is indisputable is that a better diet leads to better health. And most people know that a “good” diet is one that cuts back on ultra-processed foods and substitutes relatively unprocessed plant foods. (You can tinker at the margins, but it’s pretty much that simple.) On this, all responsible global experts agree.

But knowledge and sound advice aren’t enough: When most choices are destructive, it’s hard to choose wisely. And between your knowledge and the execution of your wishes stands a $14 billion food advertising budget, the vast majority of which promotes fast food, sugary drinks, candy and unhealthy snacks. (The total budget of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “chronic disease prevention and health promotion” is less than $1 billion.) Thus, the failed New Year’s resolutions.

Healthy food exists, of course, but it’s overwhelmingly marketed to a specific demographic: wealthier, often white people, almost always adults. Children, poorer whites and especially people of color are the primary targets of ultra-processed-food sales.

There are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States, and they’re found more in poor areas than in wealthy ones. So-called food deserts — areas where healthy and affordable food choices are nil — are better labeled as areas of food apartheid and are found more often in poor areas, especially those whose residents are people of color. It’s money that brings supermarkets and good food options to a neighborhood, and even bringing a new grocery store to a lower-income neighborhood doesn’t improve things much if people’s incomes remain low.

The primary determinant of the quality of diet is income, not ignorance, intelligence or will. With 12 percent of Americans going hungry, and millions of households with children uncertain that they’ll be able to feed their kids, the “choice” is often between eating processed food and not eating at all. With each passing generation, unhealthful diets become more normalized. Food preferences begin to be shaped in utero. One study found that mothers with varied diets who breastfeed and wean their children with normal food create much different eaters than mothers with standard American diets who rely on formula and baby food. When we began to feed our children as marketers dictated, pushing the gloss of “convenience” and “modernity,” the cycle spiraled out of control.

Only good policy can rescue us, but government has largely been a part of this problem, embracing the interests of agribusiness, food processors, marketers and retailers. The weight that our society really needs to shed is the shame we allow ourselves to feel for a problem we didn’t create. Or, to put it more bluntly, the dead weight of the profiteers who poison us, and of the plutocrats who abet them.

Mark Bittman, a former food columnist for The Times, is the writer of the forthcoming “Animal, Vegetable, Junk” and is on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia.