Daily Archives: 9 Jul 06

SETI, the Fermi Paradox and The Singularity:

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Why our search for extraterrestial intelligence has failed: “The Fermi Paradox was first stated by Enrico Fermi in 1950 during a lunch time conversation. Fermi, a certified genius, used some straightforward math to show that if technological civilizations were common and moderately long-lived, then the galaxy ought to be fully inhabited [10]. The vast distances of interstellar space should not be a significant barrier to any such civilization –assuming exponential population growth and plausible technology.

‘Contact’ should thus be completely inevitable; we ought to find unavoidable evidence of ‘little green men’ all about us. Our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) should have been quickly successful.

We don’t. It hasn’t been. That’s the paradox.

This paradoxical failure is sometimes called ‘The Great Silence’. The Great Silence suggests that space traveling technological civilizations are extremely rare (or very discrete [8]). There have been a number of explanations for the why such civilizations might be rare. I list four explanations below. You can choose the one you like; they are as close to destiny as we are likely to get….”

This is from John Faughnan, whose weblog I just found by accident and who seems to resonate with many of my interests. The Fermi paradox is one of his preoccupations, it seems.

Are You Reading This on Medlogs.Com?

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For readers of FmH — unless you read the comments under the post to which this link points on my weblog Follow Me Here, you would probably not know that FmH is syndicated at medlogs.com.

For readers via Medlogs — I am posting this largely for you. Recently, an anonymous Medlogs reader, in the midst of a mutually rather acrimonious exchange with me in the comments section of FmH, let me know on FmH that s/he has complained to the sysop of Medlogs about my posts syndicated there. She/he claimed that the problem was the volume of posts with non-medical content originating from FmH; I think the issue is really that s/he does not like my political position. Her/his original derogatory comment on FmH did not even mention any supposed concern about medlogs.com:

(Anon): “Maybe it has to do with an idiotic leftist content that you provide. Maybe it has to do with your overwhelming paranoia. Maybe we just don’t have the time to read pages and pages and pages of garbage by you, someone we don’t know. If it’s not good, its not fun, it’s not relevant, it’s not interesting, it’s not original, it’s not touching, then it’s not worth to read. Ever thought about it?”

Only when s/he became defensive after pressed about her/his demeanor did the commenter mention that s/he felt I was hogging the bandwidth at Medlogs:

(Me): “Anon — first off, thank you for your opinion, but you do not seem to be a very close reader of the post to which you are responding! You seem to be answering a question I wasn’t even asking, which is why I don’t have more readers. Read my post again, and see if you make another stab at understanding whether that is important to me.

But, more important, why in the world are you reading FmH? I’d suggest you stop, for your own welfare! Otherwise, what does it say about your life that you visit a site that is “idiotic”, “garbage”, “not fun”, “not interesting”, “not original”, “not touching”, not worthwhile?

Sorry you do not seem receptive to what is offered here. Ah, maybe I understand what FmH does for you! You need a place to vent your spleen! …in which case you are welcome to get yer rocks off by coming here. And, in the process, thanks for being a perfect illustration of the futility of dialogue with rightward-twisted wingnuts whose discourse consists only of namecalling.

(Anon): “I don’t read your idiotic rants. Unfortunately, this garbage overwhelms Medlogs.com with asinine political content of yours. And you betcha, I did complain about it to Jacob Reider. On some days, Medlogs.com looks like left-idiot’s-rants.com. I would suggest that for the sake of respecting other people’s work (in this case, Jacob’s), you delist your garbage off Medlogs.com. Then, some of us will ever (sic) see it again.”

You can read the rest of the exchange by scrolling down from here. (Not me at my best…)

(Ironically, this complaint about the volume of my posts and the offensiveness of my politics was in response to an item I had put up on FmH considering the decreasing volume of my posts at this point in my weblogging career. In particular, I am posting less political material, as I explain in the post in terms of “Bush fatigue.”)

But back to the issue at hand. My impression is that medlogs.com is not a weblog for medical posts but rather a weblog syndicating medical webloggers’ posts; as you can see, an important distinction. To my way of thinking, it is a dull medical professional who is interested in nothing but medical content, and most medical professionals I know are interested in a broader range of their colleagues’ thoughts. That’s my notion of the medical community crystallized by medlogs.com. FmH represents a cross-section of the thoughts and interests of a psychiatrist (albeit a leftwing antiwar anti-Bush one); seemed to have a place on Medlogs.

I would imagine that if I was offbase in that respect I would have long since heard from Jacob Reider or other Medlogs readers. The page to add a site to Medlogs says, “We will get to feed requests ASAP.” I take that to mean that Reider reviews sites applying for admission to medlogs.com to see if they are appropriate; for just this reason, it would be a great gamble not to do so. In that case, my content was deemed to be in the acceptable ballpark. In any case, I wrote to Reider about this difference of opinion and asked him to clarify. I told him that, although he might be reluctant to kick me off in response to concerns about my content because the action might have the appearance of political censorship, I offered that I would voluntarily withdraw FmH from Medlogs syndication if he thought it would be the right thing to do . I have yet to hear back from Reider.

I am posting this now because I think it would be responsible of me to solicit other Medlogs’ readers opinions about whether I am sullying their reading experience and whether I should leave Medlogs. Do you share the concerns of the scurrilous, anonymous complainant? Do you find my posts on Medlogs out of place or is the content I add acceptable in light of what you understand Medlog’s raison d’etre to be? I know there is some selection bias in phrasing a question in this manner; I ask sympathetic readers to consider replying as readily as others might do it in antipathy. You can let me know by going to the copy of this post on FmH and entering a comment. Please identify yourself as a Medlogs reader (and don’t share the complainant’s cowardice by remaining anonymous, please). Thank you for your input, and I would be happy to leave Medlogs if the preponderance of opinion supports that. I would be happy to see Anon. eat crow if the preponderance of the evidence supported that outcome… (but I will not hold my breath).

R.I.P. Joseph J. Schildkraut

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Brain Chemistry Researcher Dies at 72. (New York Times ) Schildkraut, if anyone, deserves to be known as the father of biological psychiatry, with seminal contributions to both the catecholamine (norepinephrine and serotonin) theory of depression and the dopamine theory of schizophrenia. His methodology, for better or worse, has been the dominant one in the field for four decades — you look at the changes in brain chemistry that result from treatment with a drug known to have clinical benefit to a psychiatric condition. If a particular change is consistently associated with clinical improvement (e.g. an increase in low catecholamine levels after antidepressant treatment), you infer that that change is responsible for the improvement. You go further and conclude that the original abnormality, in this case the low catecholamine levels, was the cause of the condition.

This way of doing things, indeed biological psychiatry as a whole, has several problems. First, it it has enshrined reductionism at the heart of psychiatric theory and solidified the error of mistaking correlation for causation. The observed chemical abnormality in a mental illness may be an epiphenomenon of other, more causal, neurochemical changes in the condition, not the cause itself. As a corollary, it constrains new drug development. If you believe catecholamine deficit is the root cause of depression, the only new substances you are going to screen for clinical effectiveness as antidepressants are those shown in the laboratory to increase brain catecholamines. If you believe that dopamine excess is the root cause of schizophrenia, the only medications you are going to screen for utility as antipsychotics are dopamine blockers. We have many counterexamples, discovered by accident, of antidepressants and antipsychotics that, while clinically effective, do not appear to work by the required biochemical mechanisms. Perhaps, if a different paradigm had dominated drug development over the last forty years, we would have many more.

Most profoundly, it has solidified a divide between those, patients and practitioners, who struggle with the meaning of mental suffering in a patient’s life and those who merely throw pills at that suffering. The notion that their illness has been caused by a ‘chemical imbalance’, as numerous patients and families have come to believe, has become a barrier to experiencing themselves as having any control over their recovery. This is a profound problem because the alteration of experience and sense of self in various mental illnesses is all about loss of agency, responsibility and locus of control in the first place.

Schildkraut himself was no such reductionist, however. Another of his areas of interest in mental illness was the relationship between depression and creativity, and he observed in 1994 that depression in artists “may have put them in touch with the inexplicable mystery at the very heart of the tragic and timeless art they aspired to produce.”

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage

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“The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

…I was using what trainers call “approximations,” rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can’t expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can’t expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.

I also began to analyze my husband the way a trainer considers an exotic animal….” — Amy Sutherland (New York Times )

The only problem is that Ms. Sutherland acts as if she has discovered these verities. Karen Pryor’s brilliant but neglected (because it had the appearance of being a dog training manual) Don’t Shoot the Dog went over the same revolutionary ground, applying reinforcement-based teaching and training to human relational problems, two decades ago.

Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts

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“We’ve got Aryan Nation grafitti in Baghdad…” “A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed ‘large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists’ to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.” (New York Times )

The growing unpopularity of the war creates an incentive for quota-burdened recruiters to appeal to the basest sentiments in the American mentality, the xenophobia and reptilian tribalism that turn into torture and massacre. But it is misleading although convenient to focus as this report does on recruiting shortfalls as the cause; they only highlight the deeper issue. As this report makes clear, it was folly for the Pentagon to believe that it could eliminate extremism with regulations or policy when the mission of this war as shaped at the highest levels of administration policy is itself xenophobic, manipulative, dishonest and jingoistic.

A Job With Travel but No Vacation

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“It’s summer now, and countless travelers are fumbling their way around the globe, heads buried in guides published by Let’s Go, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides and Frommer’s among others. Probably few stop to consider what goes into producing travel guides or even who wrote them. And as it turns out, many of the intrepid young writers scouring the planet doing research for next year’s crop of guidebooks never stopped to consider what those jobs would entail, other than the romantic — and often overstated — prospect of being paid to travel.” (New York Times )

R.I.P. Joseph J. Schildkraut

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Brain Chemistry Researcher Dies at 72. (New York Times ) Schildkraut, if anyone, deserves to be known as the father of biological psychiatry, with seminal contributions to both the catecholamine (norepinephrine and serotonin) theory of depression and the dopamine theory of schizophrenia. His methodology, for better or worse, has been the dominant one in the field for four decades — you look at the changes in brain chemistry that result from treatment with a drug known to have clinical benefit to a psychiatric condition. If a particular change is consistently associated with clinical improvement (e.g. an increase in low catecholamine levels after antidepressant treatment), you infer that that change is responsible for the improvement. You go further and conclude that the original abnormality, in this case the low catecholamine levels, was the cause of the condition.

This way of doing things, indeed biological psychiatry as a whole, has several problems. First, it it has enshrined reductionism at the heart of psychiatric theory and solidified the error of mistaking correlation for causation. The observed chemical abnormality in a mental illness may be an epiphenomenon of other, more causal, neurochemical changes in the condition, not the cause itself. As a corollary, it constrains new drug development. If you believe catecholamine deficit is the root cause of depression, the only new substances you are going to screen for clinical effectiveness as antidepressants are those shown in the laboratory to increase brain catecholamines. If you believe that dopamine excess is the root cause of schizophrenia, the only medications you are going to screen for utility as antipsychotics are dopamine blockers. We have many counterexamples, discovered by accident, of antidepressants and antipsychotics that, while clinically effective, do not appear to work by the required biochemical mechanisms. Perhaps, if a different paradigm had dominated drug development over the last forty years, we would have many more.

Most profoundly, it has solidified a divide between those, patients and practitioners, who struggle with the meaning of mental suffering in a patient’s life and those who merely throw pills at that suffering. The notion that their illness has been caused by a ‘chemical imbalance’, as numerous patients and families have come to believe, has become a barrier to experiencing themselves as having any control over their recovery. This is a profound problem because the alteration of experience and sense of self in various mental illnesses is all about loss of agency, responsibility and locus of control in the first place.

Schildkraut himself was no such reductionist, however. Another of his areas of interest in mental illness was the relationship between depression and creativity, and he observed in 1994 that depression in artists “may have put them in touch with the inexplicable mystery at the very heart of the tragic and timeless art they aspired to produce.”