Luig Zingales writes a very interesting article about some of the new scandals in financial markets (the insider-trading trial of Raj Rajaratnam). ... From the article you can see that there is a sense of disbelief about what is happening:
"It is so difficult to imagine that successful executives would jeopardize their careers and reputations in this way that many of us probably hope that the accusations turn out to be without merit."
This quote reminds me of a recent one by Alan Greenspan regarding the behavior of financial institutions prior to the crisis (from October 2008):
"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief."
Despite his disbelief, Zingales admits that there is some recent evidence that supports the idea that personal networks can be a source of excess returns in financial markets.
I'm quite sure that Greenspan was telling the truth when he spoke of his shocked disbelief at seeing financial titans go against their obvious self-interest. Just as I am constantly amazed at the things supposedly rational and intelligent human beings do that go against their obvious self-interest. And as no doubt they are amazed at the behaviours of mine that go against my obvious self-interest.
For that matter, my daughter's mother is constantly reminding me that the quality of my life would be immeasurably improved if only I did exactly what she tole me to do, instantly and without any argument. Mixed in with these lectures are expressions of astonishment - if not outright disbelief - that I don't intuitively and immediately see this, seeing as how I'm supposed to be a pretty smart guy.
I'm thinking I'm seeing a pattern here :-)
]]>Mining this idea has a long pedigree in the sf field, of course. You have guys like Philip E. High writing in the 60's about how Telepathy Will Solve Everything. More contemporary writers can't resist laying down their own riffs on the theme either, for example, Greg Egan's Tap. Egan being who he is and the times being what they are, the gimmick here is an improved language made possible by advanced technology, but the basic idea is still the same.
It's a notion I disagree with, btw. Not that understanding another person's point of view isn't a good thing in and of itself. I'm just skeptical that said understanding will significantly change people's behaviour for the better.
]]>Nitpick: I don't think you can really go further than seeing each codon as a "gene", and even that's pretty absurd. The traditional view of a gene as the sequence between stop codons that codes for the amino acid sequence of a protein is as small a scale as I think really makes sense, and even that view has a problem: see the next paragraph.
My problem with Dawkin's view of things is that his idea of a gene doesn't really fit what happens at the molecular level very well: his ideas work fine if you think of a gene in the Mendelian sense, but when you try to map that to what happens to codon sequences on chromosomes, it just doesn't fit. At a global level, and just looking at genes that directly code for protein synthesis, it's not usually the case that a single protein controls a single phenotypic trait that is going to get selected for all by itself; usually it's whole constellations of proteins that coordinate to produce some function or structure. And when you add in the epigenetic behavior of genes that control the expression of other genes, well, the lone gunman "selfish gene" just isn't in the picture.
]]>ISTM that many of the concepts of magic that I've read about in various cultures started out in an animistic view of the world. When you have no real idea of the workings of physics or chemistry, you have to fall back on what you can observe in the natural world around you for notions about the nature of causality, and what the prime causes of actions like the wind and the rain are. The causes you normally see are the intentions of humans and animals, so it's quite reasonable to assume that the action of the wind or the motions of earthquakes are caused by sentient forces, spirits or something very like, that reside in what to the unaided senses seem like inanimate objects.
]]>Also we, the UK, are actually in a Republic with an hereditary Head-of-State. I know Charlie and I disagree on this one but: consider what happened to Edward VIII when he stepped too far out-of-line (and Wallis Simpson was very convenient excuse - she wasn't the real reason he was got rid of...) See also @ 48. Republics, of course, are not inherently superior either. Huge numbers of them are/were Oligarchies - classical Venice must be a good example. Or the USA for most of its' history ....
@ 6 N. Korea is ruled by God-Kings. Especially since communism is a religion anyway. See also Charlie @ 16, 33.
@ 27 And it is called; "The Culture" - is it not?
Charlie @ 28 Not quite. Juan Carlos could see the modern world happening, and that the Franco-model would not work for a current European state, especially with better communications. He deserves more credit than he was given, especially from the idiot socialists - who got their sharp lesson when the subsequent revanchist coup failed. (Thanks to Juan Carlos)
Bruno @ 43, 44 Gaddafi rates only a 2 ... and precisely. Look at Tunisia/Egypt. The "bosses" tried to quell the revolutions by cutting off the INTERNET! Oops - which REALLY started the revolution. Interesting, no?
@ 46 Erm - the Censorship Wars in "Glasshouse"?
Unholy Guy @ 69 Not even wrong. Religion is the OPPOSITE of democracy. Theocracies are the most oppressive form of dictatorship possible. Even C. S. Lewis, of all people, spotted that one: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
@ 94 Very good. The Stuarts tried too hard, since they saw the rise of a middle class as a threat, not an opportunity. Unlike their predecessor who said, and meant both of the following: "Little man, the word "must" is not used to Princes" AND "But I have reigned, and hope to reign with all your loves" She knew enough to give-way gracefully, when it became obvious that part of guvmint policy was wrong ... But, then, that was Gloriana.
@ 122 "Going against their obvious self-interest" Two classic examples. 1] ANY religious believer 2] Anyone voting Rethuglican in the USA.
Last thought. Self-selecting small power groups in smaller sections of society. To those in the UK, think of Derek Hatton's lunacies in Liverpool approx 1975-90, which nearly destroyed that city, both socially and economically - yet he managed to get people to continue to vote for him - by indirect bribery. And other examples of "entryism", as it is now called in other political parties (all of them) in various parts of the UK, where self-selecting religious groups of (usually) one particular religion are attempting to take over, and subvert at least the local power structures. THEY will benefit, but everyone else won't. But most people won't notice unless it's too late, usually, especially as we must always "respect" other peoples' beliefs. Erm.
]]>Mendelian genes were the basic unit of hereditable phenotypic traits. Post-1947 Crick-and-Watson-and-Franklin DNA studies assumed that exons corresponded one-to-one with Mendelian genes ... and in some cases that comes close to representing the situation (especially if you go all the way up to the operon level), except it seems to break down when we move from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, and collapses in ruins when we look at tissue differentiation in multicellular eukaryotes (like ourselves), for example, where whole complexes of Crick/Watson/Franklin "genes" are set in motion to produce quite subtle effects which have side-effects which interact with the side-effects of other complexes to result in us sprouting arms on our shoulders instead of our foreheads.
]]>Only the past 18 years in science fiction, since this talk by Vernor Vinge and the subsequent co-option of the term by second-handers like Ray Kurzweil.
]]>The point is, the term has been used imprecisely by so many people that it has become useless; it's a desert topping, a floor wax, and anything else you want it to be (as long as it's fast and shiny).
]]>I don't agree. AIUI, Dawkins is saying that a given replicator is "selfish" in the sense that its conservation comes at the cost of other replicators (I'm deliberatley not using the word "gene" here). But we know of many cases of genetic replicators which were selected individually in some lineage of organisms and then later were incorporated into constellations of replicators which became conserved as a group. This can, and I think often does, mean that the original replicators are constrained by conservation of the constellations they are in to not increase their numbers by duplication or by expression by themselves without the rest of the constellation. This, in my view, is not "selfishness" but conservation through cooperation.
]]>Heated agreement. Now that molecular biologists have finally accepted that information theory and the thermodynamics of information are useful concepts when applied to genetics1, maybe we can get agreement on some fresh concepts of what the genome is composed of.
One of the more hilarious interviews I've read in the last few years was one with Crick, in which he admitted that he really hadn't meant to call it the "Central Dogma of Molecular Biology", but he couldn't think of another word at the time. So a proposal that he put forward as tentative, and which he says he really doesn't believe in anymore, became almost a religious principle for 2 generations of biologists. Moral: keep a thesaurus handy when proposing sweeping generalizations.
As an old person (64 at the moment) who has been diagnosed with ADD and has probably had it since age 12 or 13, and who has raised two children, one diagnosed at age 12 with ADHD and the other not diagnosed but probably having ADD, I can testify from long experience that sugar can have extreme effects on children. Hyperactivity, stomach upset, mood swings, and the list of symptoms goes on. Long term effects? Almost certainly, but that's much harder to tease out from anecdotal evidence.
]]>Have considerations for the things (in the widest sense) that you are interacting with.
]]>It's been quite some time since I read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, so it's possible I'm exaggerating his position somewhat, but I don't think I'm distorting it beyond recognition. And my take on him is to some extent colored by the debates of the time of his writing (the late 1970s and early 1980s). Aside from the primary argument of gene selection versus group selection, in which Dawkins pushed gene selection very hard as an alternative to group selection, which he did not believe in at all, that was the period in which the importance of symbiosis and parasitism as drivers of evolution was debated. This turns out to be a very useful notion, but Dawkins and many others argued against it as being non-reductionist; too much like the argument for group selection.
And that's the point I disagree with Dawkins on the most: I think his definition of reductionism is much too rigid because it insists that only causes at the lowest level are "real". The way I see it, if you talk about replicators, not genes, you need to recognize that there isn't a one-to-one mapping between the two; Dawkins may accept that now, but he certainly didn't when he wrote The Selfish Gene. Reductionism is a useful tool, but it's not a universal truth: if you apply it too strictly you run the risk of overlooking the effects of high-level systems operating far from equilibrium, that is to say, most of the things that the biological sciences find interesting.
]]>