Saturday, February 3, 2018
Retreat, America
American troops were deployed in well over 150 countries, and Special Forces in 138 countries as of 2016. Lest you think this accounts for just a random troop stationed here or there, overall, as of September 2017, there were significant deployments of over 1,000 troops in 19 countries: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Belgium, Cuba, Djibouti, Germany, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Jordan, South Korea, Kuwait, Qatar, Spain, Syria, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom, according to a Pentagon spreadsheet.
The two biggest deployments are Cold War-vintage bases designed to check the Soviet Union. Germany has 47,055 U.S. troops and Japan has 51,452 military personnel. These, at least, seem relatively harmless. But that's about all that can be said for them.
Why are we bothering to maintain huge bases at vast expense in the middle of peaceful countries, almost three decades after the principal reason for their existence has vanished? Most or all of these Americans can come home. America can easily maintain the nuclear security umbrella over Europe with a couple submarines. We don't need tens of thousands of people there.
We have 27,123 Americans deployed in South Korea. That's a more sensitive area because Trump keeps ratcheting up tensions. But I will concede that even without him, one wouldn't want to simply pull out those troops and upset the delicate status quo. After Trump is gone, U.S. diplomats should work on finally ending the Korean War (which is technically still going on), and restoring a state of peaceful relations between the two countries. If that can be achieved (a big if, to be sure), then that deployment can be drastically reduced as well.
Middle East deployments are the next biggest category. Afghanistan has 16,500 people, Bahrain has 9,826, Djibouti has 4,715, Iraq has 9,123, Jordan has 2,730, Kuwait has 16,712, Qatar has 6,671, Syria has 1,723, Turkey has 2,273, and the U.A.E. has 4,240. It's hard to know exactly what these people are even doing due to secrecy and military deception, but I submit that they are almost completely worthless in terms of U.S. national interest — and often deeply harmful.
For starters, Afghanistan is lost, and the sooner we admit that, the better. Iraq has mostly taken back its territory from ISIS, and ought to be allowed to stand on its own feet. Much of the rest of these deployments are supporting drone strikes, a wretched policy that has a high rate of civilian casualties and has given entire towns and villages PTSD. Those should be stopped immediately as well.
The things we are doing in these countries are not helping anyone, and the people who are doing them should come home.
That brings me to the hundreds of small Special Forces deployments. The military won't even list all the names of every country these people are involved in, but I see no reason to suspect they're doing any good at all. First, the level of military aggression going on these days with no input from Congress or the citizenry — where you sometimes can't even know what country the commandos are in, let alone what they're doing — is appalling. If American forces are to be deployed, let it happen after democratic deliberation, not because some mercenary corporation has close ties to the White House.
Second, as Jeremy Scahill wrote in his book Dirty Wars, the actual U.S. record in this kind of brushfire conflict is almost universally abysmal. It's akin to what British colonial troops used to do back in the heyday of that global empire. It's a safe bet that pretty much all of these troops can come home now.
Obviously one can't make a complete strategic plan without knowing exactly what these troops are doing. But what we can say is that the Greater Middle East is nearly two decades into violent American meddling in every corner of the place, and is a smoking ruin very largely because of that. Soon enough, the young Americans enlisting to fight in Afghanistan will have been born after the war there started. The country is worse off today than it was in 2001. Why are we still there?
The two biggest deployments are Cold War-vintage bases designed to check the Soviet Union. Germany has 47,055 U.S. troops and Japan has 51,452 military personnel. These, at least, seem relatively harmless. But that's about all that can be said for them.
Why are we bothering to maintain huge bases at vast expense in the middle of peaceful countries, almost three decades after the principal reason for their existence has vanished? Most or all of these Americans can come home. America can easily maintain the nuclear security umbrella over Europe with a couple submarines. We don't need tens of thousands of people there.We have 27,123 Americans deployed in South Korea. That's a more sensitive area because Trump keeps ratcheting up tensions. But I will concede that even without him, one wouldn't want to simply pull out those troops and upset the delicate status quo. After Trump is gone, U.S. diplomats should work on finally ending the Korean War (which is technically still going on), and restoring a state of peaceful relations between the two countries. If that can be achieved (a big if, to be sure), then that deployment can be drastically reduced as well.
Middle East deployments are the next biggest category. Afghanistan has 16,500 people, Bahrain has 9,826, Djibouti has 4,715, Iraq has 9,123, Jordan has 2,730, Kuwait has 16,712, Qatar has 6,671, Syria has 1,723, Turkey has 2,273, and the U.A.E. has 4,240. It's hard to know exactly what these people are even doing due to secrecy and military deception, but I submit that they are almost completely worthless in terms of U.S. national interest — and often deeply harmful.
For starters, Afghanistan is lost, and the sooner we admit that, the better. Iraq has mostly taken back its territory from ISIS, and ought to be allowed to stand on its own feet. Much of the rest of these deployments are supporting drone strikes, a wretched policy that has a high rate of civilian casualties and has given entire towns and villages PTSD. Those should be stopped immediately as well.
The things we are doing in these countries are not helping anyone, and the people who are doing them should come home.
That brings me to the hundreds of small Special Forces deployments. The military won't even list all the names of every country these people are involved in, but I see no reason to suspect they're doing any good at all. First, the level of military aggression going on these days with no input from Congress or the citizenry — where you sometimes can't even know what country the commandos are in, let alone what they're doing — is appalling. If American forces are to be deployed, let it happen after democratic deliberation, not because some mercenary corporation has close ties to the White House.
Second, as Jeremy Scahill wrote in his book Dirty Wars, the actual U.S. record in this kind of brushfire conflict is almost universally abysmal. It's akin to what British colonial troops used to do back in the heyday of that global empire. It's a safe bet that pretty much all of these troops can come home now.
Obviously one can't make a complete strategic plan without knowing exactly what these troops are doing. But what we can say is that the Greater Middle East is nearly two decades into violent American meddling in every corner of the place, and is a smoking ruin very largely because of that. Soon enough, the young Americans enlisting to fight in Afghanistan will have been born after the war there started. The country is worse off today than it was in 2001. Why are we still there?
by Ryan Cooper, The Week | Read more:
Image: Asmaa Waguih
An Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness
You've got an ancient virus in your brain. In fact, you've got an ancient virus at the very root of your conscious thought.
According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals. That snippet of code is still very much alive in humans' brains today, where it does the very viral task of packaging up genetic information and sending it from nerve cells to their neighbors in little capsules that look a whole lot like viruses themselves. And these little packages of information might be critical elements of how nerves communicate and reorganize over time — tasks thought to be necessary for higher-order thinking, the researchers said.
Though it may sound surprising that bits of human genetic code come from viruses, it's actually more common than you might think: A review published in Cell in 2016 found that between 40 and 80 percent of the human genome arrived from some archaic viral invasion. [Unraveling the Human Genome: 6 Molecular Milestones]
That's because viruses aren't just critters that try to make a home in a body, the way bacteria do. Instead, as Live Science has previously reported, a virus is a genetic parasite. It injects its genetic code into its host's cells and hijacks them, turning them to its own purposes — typically, that means as factories for making more viruses. This process is usually either useless or harmful to the host, but every once in a while, the injected viral genes are benign or even useful enough to hang around. The 2016 review found that viral genes seem to play important roles in the immune system, as well as in the early days of embryo development.
But the new papers take things a step further. Not only is an ancient virus still very much active in the cells of human and animal brains, but it seems to be so important to how they function that processes of thought as we know them likely never would have arisen without it, the researchers said.
by Rafi Letzter, Live Science | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
[ed. The premise of Neal Stephenson's excellent novel Snow Crash.]
According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals. That snippet of code is still very much alive in humans' brains today, where it does the very viral task of packaging up genetic information and sending it from nerve cells to their neighbors in little capsules that look a whole lot like viruses themselves. And these little packages of information might be critical elements of how nerves communicate and reorganize over time — tasks thought to be necessary for higher-order thinking, the researchers said.
Though it may sound surprising that bits of human genetic code come from viruses, it's actually more common than you might think: A review published in Cell in 2016 found that between 40 and 80 percent of the human genome arrived from some archaic viral invasion. [Unraveling the Human Genome: 6 Molecular Milestones]That's because viruses aren't just critters that try to make a home in a body, the way bacteria do. Instead, as Live Science has previously reported, a virus is a genetic parasite. It injects its genetic code into its host's cells and hijacks them, turning them to its own purposes — typically, that means as factories for making more viruses. This process is usually either useless or harmful to the host, but every once in a while, the injected viral genes are benign or even useful enough to hang around. The 2016 review found that viral genes seem to play important roles in the immune system, as well as in the early days of embryo development.
But the new papers take things a step further. Not only is an ancient virus still very much active in the cells of human and animal brains, but it seems to be so important to how they function that processes of thought as we know them likely never would have arisen without it, the researchers said.
by Rafi Letzter, Live Science | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
[ed. The premise of Neal Stephenson's excellent novel Snow Crash.]
The Banana Trick
Beneath the bland veneer of supermarket automation lurks an ugly truth: There’s a lot of shoplifting going on in the self-scanning checkout lane. But don’t call it shoplifting. The guys in loss prevention prefer “external shrinkage.”
Self-checkout theft has become so widespread that a whole lingo has sprung up to describe its tactics. Ringing up a T-bone ($13.99/lb) with a code for a cheap ($0.49/lb) variety of produce is “the banana trick.” If a can of Illy espresso leaves the conveyor belt without being scanned, that’s called “the pass around.” “The switcheroo” is more labor-intensive: Peel the sticker off something inexpensive and place it over the bar code of something pricey. Just make sure both items are about the same weight, to avoid triggering that pesky “unexpected item” alert in the bagging area.
How common are self-scanning scams? If anonymous online questionnaires are any indication, very common. When Voucher Codes Pro, a company that offers coupons to internet shoppers, surveyed 2,634 people, nearly 20 percent admitted to having stolen at the self-checkout in the past. More than half of those people said they gamed the system because detection by store security was unlikely. A 2015 study of self-checkouts with handheld scanners, conducted by criminologists at the University of Leicester, also found evidence of widespread theft. After auditing 1 million self-checkout transactions over the course of a year, totaling $21 million in sales, they found that nearly $850,000 worth of goods left the store without being scanned and paid for.
The Leicester researchers concluded that the ease of theft is likely inspiring people who might not otherwise steal to do so. Rather than walk into a store intending to take something, a shopper might, at the end of a trip, decide that a discount is in order. As one retail employee told the researchers, “People who traditionally don’t intend to steal [might realize that] … when I buy 20, I can get five for free.” The authors further proposed that retailers bore some blame for the problem. In their zeal to cut labor costs, the study said, supermarkets could be seen as having created “a crime-generating environment” that promotes profit “above social responsibility.” (...)
Perhaps it’s not surprising that some people steal from machines more readily than from human cashiers. “Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron,” reads one of the more militant comments in a Reddit discussion on the subject. “There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.” Barbara Staib, the director of communications of the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, believes that self-checkouts tempt people who are already predisposed to shoplifting, by allowing them to rationalize their behavior. “Most shoplifters are in fact otherwise law-abiding citizens. They would chase behind you to return the $20 bill you dropped, because you’re a person and you would miss that $20.” A robot cashier, though, changes the equation: It “gives the false impression of anonymity,” Staib says. “This apparently empowers people to shoplift.”
by Rene Chun, The Atlantic | Read more:
Self-checkout theft has become so widespread that a whole lingo has sprung up to describe its tactics. Ringing up a T-bone ($13.99/lb) with a code for a cheap ($0.49/lb) variety of produce is “the banana trick.” If a can of Illy espresso leaves the conveyor belt without being scanned, that’s called “the pass around.” “The switcheroo” is more labor-intensive: Peel the sticker off something inexpensive and place it over the bar code of something pricey. Just make sure both items are about the same weight, to avoid triggering that pesky “unexpected item” alert in the bagging area.
How common are self-scanning scams? If anonymous online questionnaires are any indication, very common. When Voucher Codes Pro, a company that offers coupons to internet shoppers, surveyed 2,634 people, nearly 20 percent admitted to having stolen at the self-checkout in the past. More than half of those people said they gamed the system because detection by store security was unlikely. A 2015 study of self-checkouts with handheld scanners, conducted by criminologists at the University of Leicester, also found evidence of widespread theft. After auditing 1 million self-checkout transactions over the course of a year, totaling $21 million in sales, they found that nearly $850,000 worth of goods left the store without being scanned and paid for.The Leicester researchers concluded that the ease of theft is likely inspiring people who might not otherwise steal to do so. Rather than walk into a store intending to take something, a shopper might, at the end of a trip, decide that a discount is in order. As one retail employee told the researchers, “People who traditionally don’t intend to steal [might realize that] … when I buy 20, I can get five for free.” The authors further proposed that retailers bore some blame for the problem. In their zeal to cut labor costs, the study said, supermarkets could be seen as having created “a crime-generating environment” that promotes profit “above social responsibility.” (...)
Perhaps it’s not surprising that some people steal from machines more readily than from human cashiers. “Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron,” reads one of the more militant comments in a Reddit discussion on the subject. “There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.” Barbara Staib, the director of communications of the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, believes that self-checkouts tempt people who are already predisposed to shoplifting, by allowing them to rationalize their behavior. “Most shoplifters are in fact otherwise law-abiding citizens. They would chase behind you to return the $20 bill you dropped, because you’re a person and you would miss that $20.” A robot cashier, though, changes the equation: It “gives the false impression of anonymity,” Staib says. “This apparently empowers people to shoplift.”
by Rene Chun, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: James Graham
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Amazon Health
It’s pretty rare for the same company to feature in two consecutive Weekly Articles; yesterday’s announcement of a health care initiative involving Amazon, though, is not only incredibly intriguing, it also fits directly into some of the most important themes on Stratechery. I couldn’t resist.
AMAZON HEALTH MARKETPLACE
What is “this”, though? It certainly is tempting to jump immediately to a possible end game predicated on the ideas I have laid out in The Amazon Tax, Amazon’s New Customer, and Amazon Go and the Future:
What would make more sense to me is that, having first built an interface for its employees, and then a standardized infrastructure for its health care suppliers, is that Amazon converts the latter into a marketplace where PBMs, insurance administrators, distributors, and pharmacies have to compete to serve employees. And then, once that marketplace is functioning, Amazon will open the floodgates on the demand side, offering that standard interface to every large employer in America.
AGGREGATION AND SUPPLIERS
This is certainly ambitious enough — basically intermediating U.S. employers and the U.S. healthcare industry — but in fact this only sets the stage for the wholesale disruption of American healthcare. First, Amazon could not only open up its standard interface to other large employers, but small-and-medium sized businesses, and even individuals; in this way the Amazon Health Marketplace could aggregate by far the most demand for healthcare.
Consolidating demand by offering a superior user experience is how aggregators gain power; given the scenario I just sketched out, Aggregation Theory has a prediction about what might happen next:
After all, if Amazon is facilitating the connection to patients, what is the point of having another intermediary? Moreover, by virtue of being the new middleman, Amazon has the unique ability to consolidate patient data in a way that is not only of massive benefit to patients and doctors but also to the application of machine learning.
Of course that leaves the insurance piece, which makes Berkshire Hathaway a useful partner; conveniently, Berkshire Hathaway is not in the health insurance business, but rather the health reinsurance business — that is, they insure the insurers. Or, to put it another way, they don’t provide any of the services that Amazon Health Marketplace might make obsolete, and specialize in the one thing Amazon Health Services would need.
Oh, and this will be really expensive, and take years to get off the ground. It certainly would be helpful to have access to financing and capital markets, which means it would be very helpful to partner with JPMorgan Chase & Company. The skills these three companies bring to bear seems far more relevant than the number of employees (and besides, the company alliance approach to traditional health care has been done).
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
From a joint press release:
From a joint press release:
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced today that they are partnering on ways to address healthcare for their U.S. employees, with the aim of improving employee satisfaction and reducing costs. The three companies, which bring their scale and complementary expertise to this long-term effort, will pursue this objective through an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints. The initial focus of the new company will be on technology solutions that will provide U.S. employees and their families with simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost.
Tackling the enormous challenges of healthcare and harnessing its full benefits are among the greatest issues facing society today. By bringing together three of the world’s leading organizations into this new and innovative construct, the group hopes to draw on its combined capabilities and resources to take a fresh approach to these critical matters…
The effort announced today is in its early planning stages, with the initial formation of the company jointly spearheaded by Todd Combs, an investment officer of Berkshire Hathaway; Marvelle Sullivan Berchtold, a Managing Director of JPMorgan Chase; and Beth Galetti, a Senior Vice President at Amazon. The longer-term management team, headquarters location and key operational details will be communicated in due course.I’ve gotten more and more questions from readers about the possibilities of Amazon and health care, even before this announcement. I’ve been surprised, to be honest, but perhaps I shouldn’t be: I was the one who declared on The Bill Simmons Podcast that “Amazon’s goal is to basically take a skim off of all economic activity”, and given that health care was 17.9% of GDP in 2016, well, I guess that means I predicted this!
AMAZON HEALTH MARKETPLACE
What is “this”, though? It certainly is tempting to jump immediately to a possible end game predicated on the ideas I have laid out in The Amazon Tax, Amazon’s New Customer, and Amazon Go and the Future:
- Amazon builds out “interfaces” for its employees (as well as those of Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan Chase — I’ll just refer to Amazon from here on out), both digital and physical, to access basic healthcare needs; these sit in front of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), insurance administrators, wholesale distributors and pharmacies.
- Amazon starts building out infrastructure for those healthcare suppliers, requiring them to serve Amazon’s employees using a standard interface.
What would make more sense to me is that, having first built an interface for its employees, and then a standardized infrastructure for its health care suppliers, is that Amazon converts the latter into a marketplace where PBMs, insurance administrators, distributors, and pharmacies have to compete to serve employees. And then, once that marketplace is functioning, Amazon will open the floodgates on the demand side, offering that standard interface to every large employer in America.
AGGREGATION AND SUPPLIERS
This is certainly ambitious enough — basically intermediating U.S. employers and the U.S. healthcare industry — but in fact this only sets the stage for the wholesale disruption of American healthcare. First, Amazon could not only open up its standard interface to other large employers, but small-and-medium sized businesses, and even individuals; in this way the Amazon Health Marketplace could aggregate by far the most demand for healthcare.
Consolidating demand by offering a superior user experience is how aggregators gain power; given the scenario I just sketched out, Aggregation Theory has a prediction about what might happen next:
Once an aggregator has gained some number of end users, suppliers will come onto the aggregator’s platform on the aggregator’s terms, effectively commoditizing and modularizing themselves. Those additional suppliers then make the aggregator more attractive to more users, which in turn draws more suppliers, in a virtuous cycle.
This means that for aggregators, customer acquisition costs decrease over time; marginal customers are attracted to the platform by virtue of the increasing number of suppliers. This further means that aggregators enjoy winner-take-all effects: since the value of an aggregator to end users is continually increasing it is exceedingly difficult for competitors to take away users or win new ones.The key words there are “commoditize and modularize”, and this is where the option I dismissed above comes into play, but not in the way most think: Amazon doesn’t create an insurance company to compete with other insurance companies (or the other pieces of healthcare infrastructure); rather, Amazon makes it possible — and desirable — for individual health care providers to come onto their platform directly, be that doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, etc.
After all, if Amazon is facilitating the connection to patients, what is the point of having another intermediary? Moreover, by virtue of being the new middleman, Amazon has the unique ability to consolidate patient data in a way that is not only of massive benefit to patients and doctors but also to the application of machine learning.
Of course that leaves the insurance piece, which makes Berkshire Hathaway a useful partner; conveniently, Berkshire Hathaway is not in the health insurance business, but rather the health reinsurance business — that is, they insure the insurers. Or, to put it another way, they don’t provide any of the services that Amazon Health Marketplace might make obsolete, and specialize in the one thing Amazon Health Services would need.
Oh, and this will be really expensive, and take years to get off the ground. It certainly would be helpful to have access to financing and capital markets, which means it would be very helpful to partner with JPMorgan Chase & Company. The skills these three companies bring to bear seems far more relevant than the number of employees (and besides, the company alliance approach to traditional health care has been done).
by Ben Thompson, Stratechery | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Why CBT is Falling Out of Favour
Everybody loves cognitive behavioural therapy. It’s the no-nonsense, quick and relatively cheap approach to mental suffering – with none of that Freudian bollocks, and plenty of scientific backing. So it was unsettling to learn, from a paper in the journal Psychological Bulletin, that it seems to be getting less effective over time. After analysing 70 studies conducted between 1977 and 2014, researchers Tom Johnsen and Oddgeir Friborg concluded that CBT is roughly half as effective in treating depression as it used to be.
What’s going on? One theory is that, as any therapy grows more popular, the proportion of inexperienced or incompetent therapists grows bigger. But the paper raises a more intriguing idea: the placebo effect. The early publicity around CBT made it seem a miracle cure, so maybe it functioned like one for a while. These days, by contrast, the chances are you know someone who’s tried CBT and didn’t miraculously become perfectly happy for ever. Our expectations have become more realistic, so effectiveness has fallen, too. Johnsen and Friborg worry that their own paper will make matters worse by further lowering people’s expectations.
All this highlights something even stranger, though: when it comes to talk therapy, what does it even mean to speak of the placebo effect? With pills, it’s straightforward: if I swallow a sugar tablet, believing it to be an antidepressant, and my depression lifts, then there’s a good chance the placebo effect is at work. But if I believe that CBT, or any therapy, is likely to work, and it does, who’s to say if my beliefs were really the cause, rather than the therapy? Beliefs are an integral part of the process, not a rival explanation. The line between what I think is going on and what is going on starts to blur. Truly convince yourself that a psychological intervention is working and by definition it’s working.
Perhaps every era needs a practice it can believe in as a miracle cure – Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1930s, CBT in the 1990s, mindfulness meditation today – until research gradually reveals it to be as flawed as everything else.
Or it could be that we’re changing as people. In 1958, a US psychoanalyst, Allen Wheelis, published a book arguing that Freudian analysis had stopped working because the American character had altered. In Freud’s day, Wheelis argued, people didn’t understand why they felt sad; psychoanalysis gave them explanations, whereupon they found it easy to transform their lives. Modern people were better at self-understanding, but they lacked the gumption to do anything about it. “Lacking the sturdy character of the Victorians,” as Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney put it in their book Willpower‚ “people didn’t have the strength to follow up on the insight and change their lives.”
The old techniques weren’t completely wrong; they’d just outlived their usefulness. If the secret of happiness is hard to find, maybe that’s because the answer keeps changing.
What’s going on? One theory is that, as any therapy grows more popular, the proportion of inexperienced or incompetent therapists grows bigger. But the paper raises a more intriguing idea: the placebo effect. The early publicity around CBT made it seem a miracle cure, so maybe it functioned like one for a while. These days, by contrast, the chances are you know someone who’s tried CBT and didn’t miraculously become perfectly happy for ever. Our expectations have become more realistic, so effectiveness has fallen, too. Johnsen and Friborg worry that their own paper will make matters worse by further lowering people’s expectations.All this highlights something even stranger, though: when it comes to talk therapy, what does it even mean to speak of the placebo effect? With pills, it’s straightforward: if I swallow a sugar tablet, believing it to be an antidepressant, and my depression lifts, then there’s a good chance the placebo effect is at work. But if I believe that CBT, or any therapy, is likely to work, and it does, who’s to say if my beliefs were really the cause, rather than the therapy? Beliefs are an integral part of the process, not a rival explanation. The line between what I think is going on and what is going on starts to blur. Truly convince yourself that a psychological intervention is working and by definition it’s working.
Perhaps every era needs a practice it can believe in as a miracle cure – Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1930s, CBT in the 1990s, mindfulness meditation today – until research gradually reveals it to be as flawed as everything else.
Or it could be that we’re changing as people. In 1958, a US psychoanalyst, Allen Wheelis, published a book arguing that Freudian analysis had stopped working because the American character had altered. In Freud’s day, Wheelis argued, people didn’t understand why they felt sad; psychoanalysis gave them explanations, whereupon they found it easy to transform their lives. Modern people were better at self-understanding, but they lacked the gumption to do anything about it. “Lacking the sturdy character of the Victorians,” as Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney put it in their book Willpower‚ “people didn’t have the strength to follow up on the insight and change their lives.”
The old techniques weren’t completely wrong; they’d just outlived their usefulness. If the secret of happiness is hard to find, maybe that’s because the answer keeps changing.
by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Nearly all therapists these days seem to be CBT practitioners. From Slate Star Codex: "The therapists I’ve seen ask patients to question whether their anxiety and their negative thoughts are rational, ever so tactfully, and the patients say “No shit, Sherlock, of course they aren’t, but just knowing that doesn’t help or make them go away, and I’ve been through this same spiel with like thirty people already. Now shut up and give me my Xanax.”. There's got to be something better. See also (from SSC): CBT in the Water Supply. And also: Powerless Placebos.]
HappyOrNot - Customer Satisfaction at the Push of a Button
In 2016, a European gas-station chain hired HappyOrNot, a small Finnish startup, to measure customer satisfaction at its hundred and fifty-plus outlets. One gas station rapidly emerged as the leader, and another as the distant laggard. But customer satisfaction can be influenced by factors unrelated to customer service, so, to check, the chain’s executives swapped the managers at the best and worst performers. Within a short time, the store at the top of the original list was at the bottom, the store at the bottom was at the top, and one of the managers was looking for work.
By the standards of traditional market research, HappyOrNot’s analysis was simplistic in the extreme. There were no comment cards, customer surveys, focus groups, or reports from incognito “mystery shoppers.” There was just crude data collected by customer-operated devices that looked almost like Fisher-Price toys: freestanding battery-powered terminals with four big push buttons—dark green and smiley, light green and less smiley, light red and sort of frowny, dark red and very frowny. As customers left a store, a small sign asked them to rate their experience by pressing one of the buttons (very happy, pretty happy, pretty unhappy, or very unhappy), and that was all.
What HappyOrNot’s gas-station data lacked in substance, though, they made up for in volume. A perennial challenge in polling is gathering responses from enough people to support meaningful conclusions. The challenge grows as the questions become more probing, since people who have the time and the inclination to fill out long, boring surveys aren’t necessarily representative customers. Even ratings on Amazon and on Walmart.com, which are visited by millions of people every day, are often based on so few responses that a single positive or negative review can affect customer purchases for months. In 2014, a study of more than a million online restaurant reviews, on sites including Foursquare, GrubHub, and TripAdvisor, found that the ratings were influenced by a number of “exogenous” factors, unrelated to food quality—among them menu prices (higher is better) and the weather on the day the reviews were written (worse is worse).
A single HappyOrNot terminal can register thousands of impressions in a day, from people who buy and people who don’t. The terminals are self-explanatory, and customers can use them without breaking stride. In the jargon of tech, giving feedback through HappyOrNot is “frictionless.” And, although the responses are anonymous, they are time-stamped. One client discovered that customer satisfaction in a particular store plummeted at ten o’clock every morning. Video from a closed-circuit security camera revealed that the drop was caused by an employee who began work at that hour and took a long time to get going. She was retrained, and the frowns went away.
Last year, a Swedish sofa retailer hired HappyOrNot to help it understand a sales problem in its stores. Revenues were high during the late afternoon and evening but low during the morning and early afternoon, and the retailer’s executives hadn’t been able to figure out what their daytime employees were doing wrong. The data from HappyOrNot’s terminals surprised them: customers felt the most satisfied during the hours when sales were low, and the least satisfied during the hours when sales were high. The executives realized that, for years, they’d looked at the problem the wrong way. Because late-day revenues had always been relatively high, the executives hadn’t considered the possibility that they should have been even higher. The company added more salespeople in the afternoon and evening, and earnings improved.
HappyOrNot was founded just eight years ago, but its terminals have already been installed in more than a hundred countries and have registered more than six hundred million responses—more than the number of online customer ratings ever posted on Amazon, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. HappyOrNot is profitable, and its revenues have doubled each year for the past several years; its clients have a habit of inquiring whether, by chance, the company is for sale—significant accomplishments for a still tiny enterprise whose leaders say that their ultimate goal is to change not just the way people think about customer satisfaction but also the way they think about happiness itself.
By the standards of traditional market research, HappyOrNot’s analysis was simplistic in the extreme. There were no comment cards, customer surveys, focus groups, or reports from incognito “mystery shoppers.” There was just crude data collected by customer-operated devices that looked almost like Fisher-Price toys: freestanding battery-powered terminals with four big push buttons—dark green and smiley, light green and less smiley, light red and sort of frowny, dark red and very frowny. As customers left a store, a small sign asked them to rate their experience by pressing one of the buttons (very happy, pretty happy, pretty unhappy, or very unhappy), and that was all.What HappyOrNot’s gas-station data lacked in substance, though, they made up for in volume. A perennial challenge in polling is gathering responses from enough people to support meaningful conclusions. The challenge grows as the questions become more probing, since people who have the time and the inclination to fill out long, boring surveys aren’t necessarily representative customers. Even ratings on Amazon and on Walmart.com, which are visited by millions of people every day, are often based on so few responses that a single positive or negative review can affect customer purchases for months. In 2014, a study of more than a million online restaurant reviews, on sites including Foursquare, GrubHub, and TripAdvisor, found that the ratings were influenced by a number of “exogenous” factors, unrelated to food quality—among them menu prices (higher is better) and the weather on the day the reviews were written (worse is worse).
A single HappyOrNot terminal can register thousands of impressions in a day, from people who buy and people who don’t. The terminals are self-explanatory, and customers can use them without breaking stride. In the jargon of tech, giving feedback through HappyOrNot is “frictionless.” And, although the responses are anonymous, they are time-stamped. One client discovered that customer satisfaction in a particular store plummeted at ten o’clock every morning. Video from a closed-circuit security camera revealed that the drop was caused by an employee who began work at that hour and took a long time to get going. She was retrained, and the frowns went away.
Last year, a Swedish sofa retailer hired HappyOrNot to help it understand a sales problem in its stores. Revenues were high during the late afternoon and evening but low during the morning and early afternoon, and the retailer’s executives hadn’t been able to figure out what their daytime employees were doing wrong. The data from HappyOrNot’s terminals surprised them: customers felt the most satisfied during the hours when sales were low, and the least satisfied during the hours when sales were high. The executives realized that, for years, they’d looked at the problem the wrong way. Because late-day revenues had always been relatively high, the executives hadn’t considered the possibility that they should have been even higher. The company added more salespeople in the afternoon and evening, and earnings improved.
HappyOrNot was founded just eight years ago, but its terminals have already been installed in more than a hundred countries and have registered more than six hundred million responses—more than the number of online customer ratings ever posted on Amazon, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. HappyOrNot is profitable, and its revenues have doubled each year for the past several years; its clients have a habit of inquiring whether, by chance, the company is for sale—significant accomplishments for a still tiny enterprise whose leaders say that their ultimate goal is to change not just the way people think about customer satisfaction but also the way they think about happiness itself.
by David Owen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: HappyOrNot
Don’t Forget How the Soviet Union Saved the World from Hitler
In the Western popular imagination -- particularly the American one -- World War II is a conflict we won. It was fought on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, through the rubble of recaptured French towns and capped by sepia-toned scenes of joy and young love in New York. It was a victory shaped by the steeliness of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the moral fiber of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the awesome power of an atomic bomb.
But that narrative shifts dramatically when you go to Russia, where World War II is called the Great Patriotic War and is remembered in a vastly different light. (...)
Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.
Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R.
The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.
"It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.
The epic battles that eventually rolled back the Nazi advance -- the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) -- had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military assets. The savagery on display was also of a different degree than that experienced farther west.
Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for "lebensraum" -- living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve.
"The Holocaust overshadows German plans that envisioned even more killing. Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs," writes historian Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin." (...)
To be sure, as Snyder documents, the Soviet Union under Stalin also had the blood of millions on its hands. In the years preceding World War II, Stalinist purges led to the death and starvation of millions. The horrors were compounded by the Nazi invasion.
"In Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the Leningrad district, lands where the Stalinist regime had starved and shot some four million people in the previous eight years, German forces managed to starve and shoot even more in half the time," Snyder writes. He says that between 1933 and 1945 in the "bloodlands" -- the broad sweep of territory on the periphery of the Soviet and Nazi realms -- some 14 million civilians were killed.
By some accounts, 60 percent of Soviet households lost a member of their nuclear family.
For Russia's neighbors, it's hard to separate the Soviet triumph from the decades of Cold War domination that followed. One can also lament the way the sacrifices of the past inform the muscular Russian nationalism now peddled by Putin and his Kremlin allies. But we shouldn't forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.
by Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Eduard Korniyenko
[ed. People have short memories. See also: Someday Donald Trump Will Be as Respected as Ronald Reagan]
But that narrative shifts dramatically when you go to Russia, where World War II is called the Great Patriotic War and is remembered in a vastly different light. (...)
Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.
Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R.The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.
"It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.
The epic battles that eventually rolled back the Nazi advance -- the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) -- had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military assets. The savagery on display was also of a different degree than that experienced farther west.
Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for "lebensraum" -- living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve.
"The Holocaust overshadows German plans that envisioned even more killing. Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs," writes historian Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin." (...)
To be sure, as Snyder documents, the Soviet Union under Stalin also had the blood of millions on its hands. In the years preceding World War II, Stalinist purges led to the death and starvation of millions. The horrors were compounded by the Nazi invasion.
"In Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the Leningrad district, lands where the Stalinist regime had starved and shot some four million people in the previous eight years, German forces managed to starve and shoot even more in half the time," Snyder writes. He says that between 1933 and 1945 in the "bloodlands" -- the broad sweep of territory on the periphery of the Soviet and Nazi realms -- some 14 million civilians were killed.
By some accounts, 60 percent of Soviet households lost a member of their nuclear family.
For Russia's neighbors, it's hard to separate the Soviet triumph from the decades of Cold War domination that followed. One can also lament the way the sacrifices of the past inform the muscular Russian nationalism now peddled by Putin and his Kremlin allies. But we shouldn't forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.
by Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Eduard Korniyenko
[ed. People have short memories. See also: Someday Donald Trump Will Be as Respected as Ronald Reagan]
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
The Secrets of Cruise Ships
At a time when travelers are feeling more precious than ever about “authentic experiences,” the cruise industry is doubling down on the exact opposite: completely manufactured fun. Leading the pack is Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., whose mega-ships are destinations unto themselves: Its restaurants, casinos, Broadway-caliber musicals, silent disco parties, skating rinks, karaoke, dance clubs, and escape-the-room experiences are such strong lures, some guests don’t even bother to look up where the ship is docking.
So when the cruise line invited me to join the ranks as temporary director of its largest ship, Harmony of the Seas—which is as big as five Titanics—I knew I was signing up for the most manic week of my life.
As cruise director, my primarily responsibility was seeing to the happiness of 6,322 passengers and 2,200-plus crew. Over the course of a week, I had my hands in every department, from ship activities and entertainment to onboard revenue, making sure that everyone and everything worked in, well, harmony. From stocking the world’s biggest buffet and staving off gastrointestinal disasters to hosting celebrity guests, everything is 10 times crazier when you’re mayor of a city that’s floating in the middle of the sea.
There Is Secret Cruise Code Language
It’s crucial for the staff to have code words so that passengers don’t get freaked out if something goes wrong. A “30-30” means the crew is asking maintenance to clean up a mess; three times during my stint I called in a “PVI” (public vomiting incident). An “Alpha” is a medical emergency, a “Bravo” is a fire, and “Kilo” is a request for all personnel to report to their emergency posts, which happens in the event of, say, a necessary evacuation. Be wary of “Echo,” which is called if the ship is starting to drift, or “Oscar,” which means someone’s gone overboard. A crew member told me he’s had only four or five “Oscars” in 10 years of cruising.
Drunk Guests Can't Outsmart the On-Board Bartenders
If you thought those all-you-can-drink beverage packages were directly correlated with drunk debauchery at sea, think again. Only eight to 10 percent of passengers purchase unlimited booze packages—Royal Caribbean’s guests are largely family travelers—and those who do are carefully monitored. Every single alcoholic beverage is poured with a jigger. Intoxicated passengers can have their SeaPasses (onboard credit cards) temporarily disabled, barring them from being served at any of the ship’s bars. As for the most popular alcoholic beverage ordered on board? It’s a cinnamon fireball shot.
According to Ivan De La Rosa, the ship’s senior doctor, the biggest issue involving alcohol is when the ship is docked in Cozumel, Mexico. Mix an afternoon of unregulated drinking on land at Señor Frogs with tropical heat and a few glasses of Mexican tap water, and you’ve got yourself a guaranteed “PVI.”
All Cruise Guests Basically Eat the Same Things
Freezers on board Harmony of the Seas are the size of New York studio apartments—and stocking them is an art form. Before each sailing, the inventory team receives enoughingredients for 20 different dining venues, plus servings for the 2,000-member crew. (The total cost, including such other consumables as paper towels, is about $800,000.) Overestimate the order, and the voyage becomes less-profitable (and wasteful); underestimate, and you’ll risk a riot over coconut shrimp.
Luckily, passengers’ eating habits are fairly predictable. On the average week-long cruise, Royal Caribbean estimates its guests will be 80 percent American, consuming around 3,000 bottles of wine, 7,000 pounds of chicken breast, and almost 100,000 eggs.
If more than 80 percent of the guests are American, the crew orders extra ketchup. When the percentage of Chinese passengers increases, they bump up the supply of sliced fruit, seafood, and rice. Latin Americans consume more red meat and Coronas (which also requires additional limes). And family-prone Spring Break cruises require three times as many chicken nuggets. The one thing that never changes no matter who is on board? Toilet paper. Around 9,600 rolls are used each week.
So when the cruise line invited me to join the ranks as temporary director of its largest ship, Harmony of the Seas—which is as big as five Titanics—I knew I was signing up for the most manic week of my life. As cruise director, my primarily responsibility was seeing to the happiness of 6,322 passengers and 2,200-plus crew. Over the course of a week, I had my hands in every department, from ship activities and entertainment to onboard revenue, making sure that everyone and everything worked in, well, harmony. From stocking the world’s biggest buffet and staving off gastrointestinal disasters to hosting celebrity guests, everything is 10 times crazier when you’re mayor of a city that’s floating in the middle of the sea.
There Is Secret Cruise Code Language
It’s crucial for the staff to have code words so that passengers don’t get freaked out if something goes wrong. A “30-30” means the crew is asking maintenance to clean up a mess; three times during my stint I called in a “PVI” (public vomiting incident). An “Alpha” is a medical emergency, a “Bravo” is a fire, and “Kilo” is a request for all personnel to report to their emergency posts, which happens in the event of, say, a necessary evacuation. Be wary of “Echo,” which is called if the ship is starting to drift, or “Oscar,” which means someone’s gone overboard. A crew member told me he’s had only four or five “Oscars” in 10 years of cruising.
Drunk Guests Can't Outsmart the On-Board Bartenders
If you thought those all-you-can-drink beverage packages were directly correlated with drunk debauchery at sea, think again. Only eight to 10 percent of passengers purchase unlimited booze packages—Royal Caribbean’s guests are largely family travelers—and those who do are carefully monitored. Every single alcoholic beverage is poured with a jigger. Intoxicated passengers can have their SeaPasses (onboard credit cards) temporarily disabled, barring them from being served at any of the ship’s bars. As for the most popular alcoholic beverage ordered on board? It’s a cinnamon fireball shot.
According to Ivan De La Rosa, the ship’s senior doctor, the biggest issue involving alcohol is when the ship is docked in Cozumel, Mexico. Mix an afternoon of unregulated drinking on land at Señor Frogs with tropical heat and a few glasses of Mexican tap water, and you’ve got yourself a guaranteed “PVI.”
All Cruise Guests Basically Eat the Same Things
Freezers on board Harmony of the Seas are the size of New York studio apartments—and stocking them is an art form. Before each sailing, the inventory team receives enoughingredients for 20 different dining venues, plus servings for the 2,000-member crew. (The total cost, including such other consumables as paper towels, is about $800,000.) Overestimate the order, and the voyage becomes less-profitable (and wasteful); underestimate, and you’ll risk a riot over coconut shrimp.
Luckily, passengers’ eating habits are fairly predictable. On the average week-long cruise, Royal Caribbean estimates its guests will be 80 percent American, consuming around 3,000 bottles of wine, 7,000 pounds of chicken breast, and almost 100,000 eggs.
If more than 80 percent of the guests are American, the crew orders extra ketchup. When the percentage of Chinese passengers increases, they bump up the supply of sliced fruit, seafood, and rice. Latin Americans consume more red meat and Coronas (which also requires additional limes). And family-prone Spring Break cruises require three times as many chicken nuggets. The one thing that never changes no matter who is on board? Toilet paper. Around 9,600 rolls are used each week.
by Brandon Presser, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Zohar Lazar
The Case Against Tom Brady
Perhaps the sight of Tom Brady’s chin dimple doesn’t blind you with seething rage. I guess you don’t have eyeballs.
Or maybe you’re not from Philadelphia. Eagles fans have recently been prevented from realizing a beloved postseason pastime—the city’s so-called “Crisco Cops” greased up downtown lamp posts to stop rowdy Philadelphians from scaling them. Perhaps now they can instead relish another classic activity: the great tradition of loathing the New England Patriots, everyone who holds them dear, and everything they represent.
The Patriots. Ugh. Even their team name is a lie. First of all, a bald eagle—so sleek! so majestic! so fierce!—is infinitely cooler than some dude wearing a tricorne hat. And can someone tell Robert Kraft that giving muskets to a bunch of LARPers in the endzone isn’t actually patriotic? Last time I checked, the cradle of liberty wasn’t in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Ben Franklin may have believed the nation’s premier bird was the turkey, but he still picked Philadelphia over Boston for a reason. (The reason: Philly’s better.)
Tom Brady. Ughhhhhh.
It isn’t the unrepentant cheating that makes him detestable—or even his thing with avocado “ice cream,”or that he’s from California, or that he wrote a bookcalled The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, or that he tried to sell people $99 science-pajamas, or that he has a controversial bromance with Donald Trump, or that he’s so wishy-washy about that bromance, or that he married a mega-successful knockout supermodel, or that he has a $44 million salary, or his 66,159 passing yards, or his five Super Bowl rings, or the fact that he is some kind of football-savant Benjamin Button who ages in reverse and physically cannot stop winning.
Actually, wait, it is the winning thing. It’s totally all the winning.
Tom Brady is eminently hate-able because he’s so damned good. But there must be more to it than that. Philadelphians can’t be that petty, right? (Don’t answer that.)
People love an underdog, in part, because spectators are hedonists; they want an emotionally pleasurable experience. And, putting aside team loyalties, it turns out that rooting for a favorite like Brady to win is especially ho-hum if that favorite ends up losing. “Because it is unexpected, an underdog’s victory is more satisfying than a favorite’s and an underdog’s loss is much less traumatic,” wrote Jimmy Frazier and Eldon Snyder, the authors of a 1991 paper published in the Sociology of Sport Journal about the appeal of teams that are expected to lose. A utilitarian model would, they said, clearly predict the underdog effect. (...)
Their findings have implications that extend beyond the sporting world. Underdogs show up throughout the history, literature, and mythology of the Western world. Going back to ancient times, one of the most compelling kinds of stories people tell is fundamentally concerned with underdog status.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for example, once observed that the arc of one classic story type—characterized by a protagonist’s steady climb in good fortune, sudden fall, and eventual ascension back to happily ever after—can be found in anything from creation stories across major religions to Cinderella. A couple years ago, I wrote about a group of computer scientists who studied the emotional path of this story pattern, compared with several others, and found that it’s among the top narrative arcs favored by readers.
This same story arc arguably mirrors the trajectory of Tom Brady’s career. It wasn’t always easy for him, back before he was the king of the Super Bowl and the husband of a supermodel. This is the same Tom Brady who got so little playing time at the University of Michigan that he nearly transferred. And the same Tom Brady who began his career as a starting player with a humiliating loss to Notre Dame. “No one expects that this guy was going to be the best football player of all time. Even him!” said Mark Snyder, who was one of the beat writers who covered Brady’s redshirt junior season for the University of Michigan’s college paper in 1998. “No one really knew who he was. He was definitely an underdog.”
by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:
Or maybe you’re not from Philadelphia. Eagles fans have recently been prevented from realizing a beloved postseason pastime—the city’s so-called “Crisco Cops” greased up downtown lamp posts to stop rowdy Philadelphians from scaling them. Perhaps now they can instead relish another classic activity: the great tradition of loathing the New England Patriots, everyone who holds them dear, and everything they represent.
The Patriots. Ugh. Even their team name is a lie. First of all, a bald eagle—so sleek! so majestic! so fierce!—is infinitely cooler than some dude wearing a tricorne hat. And can someone tell Robert Kraft that giving muskets to a bunch of LARPers in the endzone isn’t actually patriotic? Last time I checked, the cradle of liberty wasn’t in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Ben Franklin may have believed the nation’s premier bird was the turkey, but he still picked Philadelphia over Boston for a reason. (The reason: Philly’s better.)Tom Brady. Ughhhhhh.
It isn’t the unrepentant cheating that makes him detestable—or even his thing with avocado “ice cream,”or that he’s from California, or that he wrote a bookcalled The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, or that he tried to sell people $99 science-pajamas, or that he has a controversial bromance with Donald Trump, or that he’s so wishy-washy about that bromance, or that he married a mega-successful knockout supermodel, or that he has a $44 million salary, or his 66,159 passing yards, or his five Super Bowl rings, or the fact that he is some kind of football-savant Benjamin Button who ages in reverse and physically cannot stop winning.
Actually, wait, it is the winning thing. It’s totally all the winning.
Tom Brady is eminently hate-able because he’s so damned good. But there must be more to it than that. Philadelphians can’t be that petty, right? (Don’t answer that.)
People love an underdog, in part, because spectators are hedonists; they want an emotionally pleasurable experience. And, putting aside team loyalties, it turns out that rooting for a favorite like Brady to win is especially ho-hum if that favorite ends up losing. “Because it is unexpected, an underdog’s victory is more satisfying than a favorite’s and an underdog’s loss is much less traumatic,” wrote Jimmy Frazier and Eldon Snyder, the authors of a 1991 paper published in the Sociology of Sport Journal about the appeal of teams that are expected to lose. A utilitarian model would, they said, clearly predict the underdog effect. (...)
Their findings have implications that extend beyond the sporting world. Underdogs show up throughout the history, literature, and mythology of the Western world. Going back to ancient times, one of the most compelling kinds of stories people tell is fundamentally concerned with underdog status.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for example, once observed that the arc of one classic story type—characterized by a protagonist’s steady climb in good fortune, sudden fall, and eventual ascension back to happily ever after—can be found in anything from creation stories across major religions to Cinderella. A couple years ago, I wrote about a group of computer scientists who studied the emotional path of this story pattern, compared with several others, and found that it’s among the top narrative arcs favored by readers.
This same story arc arguably mirrors the trajectory of Tom Brady’s career. It wasn’t always easy for him, back before he was the king of the Super Bowl and the husband of a supermodel. This is the same Tom Brady who got so little playing time at the University of Michigan that he nearly transferred. And the same Tom Brady who began his career as a starting player with a humiliating loss to Notre Dame. “No one expects that this guy was going to be the best football player of all time. Even him!” said Mark Snyder, who was one of the beat writers who covered Brady’s redshirt junior season for the University of Michigan’s college paper in 1998. “No one really knew who he was. He was definitely an underdog.”
by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Team Up to Try to Disrupt Health Care
Three corporate behemoths — Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase — announced on Tuesday that they would form an independent health care company for their employees in the United States.
The alliance was a sign of just how frustrated American businesses are with the state of the nation’s health care system and the rapidly spiraling cost of medical treatment. It also caused further turmoil in an industry reeling from attempts by new players to attack a notoriously inefficient, intractable web of doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical companies.
It was unclear how extensively the three partners would overhaul their employees’ existing health coverage — whether they would simply help workers find a local doctor, steer employees to online medical advice or use their muscle to negotiate lower prices for drugs and procedures. While the alliance will apply only to their employees, these corporations are so closely watched that whatever successes they have could become models for other businesses.
Major employers, from Walmart to Caterpillar, have tried for years to tackle the high costs and complexity of health care, and have grown increasingly frustrated as Congress has deadlocked over the issue, leaving many of the thorniest issues to private industry. About 151 million Americans get their health insurance from an employer.
But Tuesday’s announcement landed like a thunderclap — sending stocks for insurers and other major health companies tumbling. Shares of health care companies like UnitedHealth Group and Anthem plunged on Tuesday, dragging down the broader stock market.
That weakness reflects the strength of the new entrants. The partnership brings together Amazon, the online retail giant known for disrupting major industries; Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company led by the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett; and JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States by assets.
They are moving into an industry where the lines between traditionally distinct areas, such as pharmacies, insurers and providers, are increasingly blurry. CVS Health’s deal last month to buy the health insurer Aetna for about $69 billion is just one example of the changes underway. Separately, Amazon’s potential entry into the pharmacy business continues to rattle major drug companies and distributors.
The companies said the initiative, which is in its early stages, would be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” but did not specify whether that meant they would create a nonprofit organization. The tax implications were also unclear because so few details were released.
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said in a statement that the effort could eventually be expanded to benefit all Americans.
“The health care system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Hard as it might be, reducing health care’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”
by Nike Wingfield, Katie Thomas and Reed Ableson, NY Times | Read more:
The alliance was a sign of just how frustrated American businesses are with the state of the nation’s health care system and the rapidly spiraling cost of medical treatment. It also caused further turmoil in an industry reeling from attempts by new players to attack a notoriously inefficient, intractable web of doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical companies.
It was unclear how extensively the three partners would overhaul their employees’ existing health coverage — whether they would simply help workers find a local doctor, steer employees to online medical advice or use their muscle to negotiate lower prices for drugs and procedures. While the alliance will apply only to their employees, these corporations are so closely watched that whatever successes they have could become models for other businesses.Major employers, from Walmart to Caterpillar, have tried for years to tackle the high costs and complexity of health care, and have grown increasingly frustrated as Congress has deadlocked over the issue, leaving many of the thorniest issues to private industry. About 151 million Americans get their health insurance from an employer.
But Tuesday’s announcement landed like a thunderclap — sending stocks for insurers and other major health companies tumbling. Shares of health care companies like UnitedHealth Group and Anthem plunged on Tuesday, dragging down the broader stock market.
That weakness reflects the strength of the new entrants. The partnership brings together Amazon, the online retail giant known for disrupting major industries; Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company led by the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett; and JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States by assets.
They are moving into an industry where the lines between traditionally distinct areas, such as pharmacies, insurers and providers, are increasingly blurry. CVS Health’s deal last month to buy the health insurer Aetna for about $69 billion is just one example of the changes underway. Separately, Amazon’s potential entry into the pharmacy business continues to rattle major drug companies and distributors.
The companies said the initiative, which is in its early stages, would be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” but did not specify whether that meant they would create a nonprofit organization. The tax implications were also unclear because so few details were released.
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said in a statement that the effort could eventually be expanded to benefit all Americans.
“The health care system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Hard as it might be, reducing health care’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”
by Nike Wingfield, Katie Thomas and Reed Ableson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Bryan Anselm
[ed. If ever an industry/system were ripe for disruption, health care is it. Now predators are stalking predators. It's significant that Amazon is involved. See also: Amazon Health.]
CHIP: Bone-Deep Risk for Heart Disease
It’s been one of the vexing questions in medicine: Why is it that most people who have heart attacks or strokes have few or no conventional risk factors?
These are patients with normal levels of cholesterol and blood pressure, no history of smoking or diabetes, and no family history of cardiovascular disease. Why aren’t they spared?
To some researchers, this hidden risk is the dark matter of cardiology: an invisible but omnipresent force that lands tens of thousands of patients in the hospital each year. But now scientists may have gotten a glimpse of part of it.
They have learned that a bizarre accumulation of mutated stem cells in bone marrow increases a person’s risk of dying within a decade, usually from a heart attack or stroke, by 40 or 50 percent. They named the condition with medical jargon: clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential.
CHIP has emerged as a risk for heart attack and stroke that is as powerful as high LDL or high blood pressure but it acts independently of them. And CHIP is not uncommon.
The condition becomes more likely with age. Up to 20 percent of people in their 60s have it, and perhaps 50 percent of those in their 80s.
“It is beginning to appear that there are only two types of people in the world: those that exhibit clonal hematopoiesis and those that are going to develop clonal hematopoiesis,” said Kenneth Walsh, who directs the hematovascular biology center at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
The growing evidence has taken heart researchers aback. Dr. Peter Libby, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, calls CHIP the most important discovery in cardiology since statins.
“I’m turning part of my lab to work on this full time,” Dr. Libby said. “It’s really exciting.”
The mutations are acquired, not inherited — most likely by bad luck or exposure to toxins like cigarette smoke. But there is little that patients can do. (...)
Dr. Benjamin Ebert, chair of medical oncology a the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, was the first to see the link. He turned for help to Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, a cardiologist and genetics researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, who had genetic data from four more large studies.
They confirmed that CHIP doubled the risk of a heart attack in typical patients — and increased the risk fourfold in those who had heart attacks early in life.
But how might mutated white blood cells cause heart disease? One clue intrigued scientists.
Artery-obstructing plaque is filled with white blood cells, smoldering with inflammation and subject to rupture. Perhaps mutated white cells were causing atherosclerosis or accelerating its development.
In separate studies, Dr. Ebert and Dr. Walsh gave mice a bone-marrow transplant containing stem cells with a CHIP mutation, along with stem cells that were not mutated. Mutated blood cells began proliferating in the mice, and they developed rapidly growing plaques that were burning with inflammation.
“For decades people have worked on inflammation as a cause of atherosclerosis,” Dr. Ebert said. “But it was not clear what initiated the inflammation.”
Now there is a possible explanation — and, Dr. Ebert said, it raises the possibility that CHIP may be involved in other inflammatory diseases, like arthritis.
These are patients with normal levels of cholesterol and blood pressure, no history of smoking or diabetes, and no family history of cardiovascular disease. Why aren’t they spared?
To some researchers, this hidden risk is the dark matter of cardiology: an invisible but omnipresent force that lands tens of thousands of patients in the hospital each year. But now scientists may have gotten a glimpse of part of it.
They have learned that a bizarre accumulation of mutated stem cells in bone marrow increases a person’s risk of dying within a decade, usually from a heart attack or stroke, by 40 or 50 percent. They named the condition with medical jargon: clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential.CHIP has emerged as a risk for heart attack and stroke that is as powerful as high LDL or high blood pressure but it acts independently of them. And CHIP is not uncommon.
The condition becomes more likely with age. Up to 20 percent of people in their 60s have it, and perhaps 50 percent of those in their 80s.
“It is beginning to appear that there are only two types of people in the world: those that exhibit clonal hematopoiesis and those that are going to develop clonal hematopoiesis,” said Kenneth Walsh, who directs the hematovascular biology center at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
The growing evidence has taken heart researchers aback. Dr. Peter Libby, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, calls CHIP the most important discovery in cardiology since statins.
“I’m turning part of my lab to work on this full time,” Dr. Libby said. “It’s really exciting.”
The mutations are acquired, not inherited — most likely by bad luck or exposure to toxins like cigarette smoke. But there is little that patients can do. (...)
Dr. Benjamin Ebert, chair of medical oncology a the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, was the first to see the link. He turned for help to Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, a cardiologist and genetics researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, who had genetic data from four more large studies.
They confirmed that CHIP doubled the risk of a heart attack in typical patients — and increased the risk fourfold in those who had heart attacks early in life.
But how might mutated white blood cells cause heart disease? One clue intrigued scientists.
Artery-obstructing plaque is filled with white blood cells, smoldering with inflammation and subject to rupture. Perhaps mutated white cells were causing atherosclerosis or accelerating its development.
In separate studies, Dr. Ebert and Dr. Walsh gave mice a bone-marrow transplant containing stem cells with a CHIP mutation, along with stem cells that were not mutated. Mutated blood cells began proliferating in the mice, and they developed rapidly growing plaques that were burning with inflammation.
“For decades people have worked on inflammation as a cause of atherosclerosis,” Dr. Ebert said. “But it was not clear what initiated the inflammation.”
Now there is a possible explanation — and, Dr. Ebert said, it raises the possibility that CHIP may be involved in other inflammatory diseases, like arthritis.
by Gina Kolata, NY Times | Read more:
Image: SPL/Science Source
Pain Tolerance Predicts Human Social Network Size
Abstract
Personal social network size exhibits considerable variation in the human population and is associated with both physical and mental health status. Much of this inter-individual variation in human sociality remains unexplained from a biological perspective. According to the brain opioid theory of social attachment, binding of the neuropeptide β-endorphin to μ-opioid receptors in the central nervous system (CNS) is a key neurochemical mechanism involved in social bonding, particularly amongst primates. We hypothesise that a positive association exists between activity of the μ-opioid system and the number of social relationships that an individual maintains. Given the powerful analgesic properties of β-endorphin, we tested this hypothesis using pain tolerance as an assay for activation of the endogenous μ-opioid system. We show that a simple measure of pain tolerance correlates with social network size in humans. Our results are in line with previous studies suggesting that μ-opioid receptor signalling has been elaborated beyond its basic function of pain modulation to play an important role in managing our social encounters. The neuroplasticity of the μ-opioid system is of future research interest, especially with respect to psychiatric disorders associated with symptoms of social withdrawal and anhedonia, both of which are strongly modulated by endogenous opioids.
Introduction
The origin of societies is considered one of the major evolutionary transitions. This has been accomplished by numerous species but arguably no society is as widespread, complex and technologically advanced as our own. The human brain has evolved to thrive in social environments, providing us with the cognitive processing power to deal with our dynamic and intricate personal relationships. However, there is limited understanding of the neurobiological processes underpinning human sociality. A growing number of studies highlight the important role played by endogenous opioid peptides, most notably β-endorphin, in affiliation and bonding in social animals such as rodents and primates, including humans. This neuropeptide is released from the CNS and has the highest binding affinity for μ-opioid receptors, which are widely distributed in the brain. Upon binding, β-endorphin induces analgesia and a sense of well-being. The brain opioid theory of social attachment postulates that the endogenous μ-opioid system is fundamental to the establishment and maintenance of social bonds. Indeed, μ-opioid neurotransmission has been shown to modulate social motivation and plays a key role in attributing positive value to social interactions. Specifically, the close relationship between the opioid and dopamine systems is integral to the rewarding nature of social interactions.
Until relatively recently, experimental evidence supporting the role of the endogenous opioid system in modulating social behaviour mainly derived from the administration of opioids and opioid blockers. For instance, humans given the μ-opioid antagonist naltrexone experience feelings of reduced social connection. With advances in genetics, knockout technology has revealed that mice lacking the μ-opioid receptor gene show severe deficits in numerous facets of social behaviour, including interactions with conspecifics, communication and infant attachment. Furthermore, there is increasing interest in the use of positron emission tomography (PET) scanning to measure activity of the μ-opioid system in relation to differences in social behaviour, both within individuals (Manninen et al. in prep) and between individuals.
Since β-endorphin is a potent analgesic, indeed more so than the pain-relieving opiate drug morphine, the primary hypothesis tested here was whether pain tolerance (as a proxy for activation of the μ-opioid system) predicts social network size. We tested this hypothesis in a population of healthy young adults (n = 101). The study involved a questionnaire relating to the two innermost social network layers (approximately corresponding to those individuals contacted at least once a week and once a month respectively), as well as collecting information on personality, sociodemographics and lifestyle. Since the blood-brain barrier is impermeable to β-endorphin, CNS endorphin levels can only be accurately determined by sampling cerebrospinal fluid via lumbar puncture, whilst measuring the μ-opioid system directly requires the use of PET scanning. Instead, pain tolerance was assessed by means of a non-invasive, physical pain test (see Methods). (...)
Discussion
Our results show that pain tolerance positively predicts social network size. This therefore supports our hypothesis that variation in the μ-opioid system underlies individual differences in sociality. These results are consistent with a recent PET imaging experiment demonstrating a correlation between μ-opioid receptor availability and attachment style, such that individuals showing greater avoidance of social attachment exhibit lower receptor densities. Our findings are also in agreement with previous pain tolerance studies indirectly implicating the endogenous opioid system in human social bonding activities such as music-making, dancing and laughter. In addition, laughter has since been shown to correlate with elevated μ-opioid activity, as measured by PET scanning (Manninen et al. in prep). This suggests that tests of pain tolerance like that used in our study may indeed serve as a useful proxy for assessing activation of the μ-opioid system.
Variation in μ-opioid receptor signalling may be due to underlying differences in both endogenous opioid release and receptor density, though their relative contribution is yet to be fully determined. However, studies of oxytocin and vasopressin signalling in rodents have shown that CNS receptor densities strongly modulate the influence of these neuropeptides, irrespective of neuropeptide abundance. In fact, analyses of post-mortem brain tissue and in vivo PET studies in humans have revealed a broad range of μ-opioid receptor densities within the population, differing by at least 30–50% (...)
Personal social network size exhibits considerable variation in the human population and is associated with both physical and mental health status. Much of this inter-individual variation in human sociality remains unexplained from a biological perspective. According to the brain opioid theory of social attachment, binding of the neuropeptide β-endorphin to μ-opioid receptors in the central nervous system (CNS) is a key neurochemical mechanism involved in social bonding, particularly amongst primates. We hypothesise that a positive association exists between activity of the μ-opioid system and the number of social relationships that an individual maintains. Given the powerful analgesic properties of β-endorphin, we tested this hypothesis using pain tolerance as an assay for activation of the endogenous μ-opioid system. We show that a simple measure of pain tolerance correlates with social network size in humans. Our results are in line with previous studies suggesting that μ-opioid receptor signalling has been elaborated beyond its basic function of pain modulation to play an important role in managing our social encounters. The neuroplasticity of the μ-opioid system is of future research interest, especially with respect to psychiatric disorders associated with symptoms of social withdrawal and anhedonia, both of which are strongly modulated by endogenous opioids.
Introduction
The origin of societies is considered one of the major evolutionary transitions. This has been accomplished by numerous species but arguably no society is as widespread, complex and technologically advanced as our own. The human brain has evolved to thrive in social environments, providing us with the cognitive processing power to deal with our dynamic and intricate personal relationships. However, there is limited understanding of the neurobiological processes underpinning human sociality. A growing number of studies highlight the important role played by endogenous opioid peptides, most notably β-endorphin, in affiliation and bonding in social animals such as rodents and primates, including humans. This neuropeptide is released from the CNS and has the highest binding affinity for μ-opioid receptors, which are widely distributed in the brain. Upon binding, β-endorphin induces analgesia and a sense of well-being. The brain opioid theory of social attachment postulates that the endogenous μ-opioid system is fundamental to the establishment and maintenance of social bonds. Indeed, μ-opioid neurotransmission has been shown to modulate social motivation and plays a key role in attributing positive value to social interactions. Specifically, the close relationship between the opioid and dopamine systems is integral to the rewarding nature of social interactions.
Until relatively recently, experimental evidence supporting the role of the endogenous opioid system in modulating social behaviour mainly derived from the administration of opioids and opioid blockers. For instance, humans given the μ-opioid antagonist naltrexone experience feelings of reduced social connection. With advances in genetics, knockout technology has revealed that mice lacking the μ-opioid receptor gene show severe deficits in numerous facets of social behaviour, including interactions with conspecifics, communication and infant attachment. Furthermore, there is increasing interest in the use of positron emission tomography (PET) scanning to measure activity of the μ-opioid system in relation to differences in social behaviour, both within individuals (Manninen et al. in prep) and between individuals.
Since β-endorphin is a potent analgesic, indeed more so than the pain-relieving opiate drug morphine, the primary hypothesis tested here was whether pain tolerance (as a proxy for activation of the μ-opioid system) predicts social network size. We tested this hypothesis in a population of healthy young adults (n = 101). The study involved a questionnaire relating to the two innermost social network layers (approximately corresponding to those individuals contacted at least once a week and once a month respectively), as well as collecting information on personality, sociodemographics and lifestyle. Since the blood-brain barrier is impermeable to β-endorphin, CNS endorphin levels can only be accurately determined by sampling cerebrospinal fluid via lumbar puncture, whilst measuring the μ-opioid system directly requires the use of PET scanning. Instead, pain tolerance was assessed by means of a non-invasive, physical pain test (see Methods). (...)
Discussion
Our results show that pain tolerance positively predicts social network size. This therefore supports our hypothesis that variation in the μ-opioid system underlies individual differences in sociality. These results are consistent with a recent PET imaging experiment demonstrating a correlation between μ-opioid receptor availability and attachment style, such that individuals showing greater avoidance of social attachment exhibit lower receptor densities. Our findings are also in agreement with previous pain tolerance studies indirectly implicating the endogenous opioid system in human social bonding activities such as music-making, dancing and laughter. In addition, laughter has since been shown to correlate with elevated μ-opioid activity, as measured by PET scanning (Manninen et al. in prep). This suggests that tests of pain tolerance like that used in our study may indeed serve as a useful proxy for assessing activation of the μ-opioid system.
Variation in μ-opioid receptor signalling may be due to underlying differences in both endogenous opioid release and receptor density, though their relative contribution is yet to be fully determined. However, studies of oxytocin and vasopressin signalling in rodents have shown that CNS receptor densities strongly modulate the influence of these neuropeptides, irrespective of neuropeptide abundance. In fact, analyses of post-mortem brain tissue and in vivo PET studies in humans have revealed a broad range of μ-opioid receptor densities within the population, differing by at least 30–50% (...)
Further research is required to understand the causality of this relationship between pain tolerance and network size. It may be that individuals with genetic variants conferring enhanced μ-opioid neurotransmission derive greater reward from social interactions, thereby seeking more company. An alternative, though not mutually exclusive, explanation is that individuals leading lives rich in social interactions may release higher levels of endogenous opioids and/or have elevated receptor expression. However, we currently lack knowledge regarding the neuroplasticity exhibited by the μ-opioid system. This is of particular interest in relation to psychiatric disorders. Indeed, healthy females asked to sustain a sad mood for only 30 minutes show a reduction in μ-opioid receptor activation. Thus prolonged sadness, as experienced by those suffering from depression, may over time lead to a significant fall in opioidergic signalling. We hypothesise that reduced μ-opioid activity may characterise the onset of conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, resulting in the common symptoms of anhedonia and social withdrawal. Indeed, endogenous opioids mediate hedonic experiences and are integral to our feelings of social connection. In support of this, there is evidence of compromised μ-opioid receptor signalling in patients suffering from depression and schizophrenia and studies using rodent models of depression also implicate the μ-opioid system. (...)
Understanding the biological causes of variation in social network size is of particular interest given the robust association between an individual’s social support and their health, ranging from functioning of their immune, endocrine and cardiovascular systems to myelin integrity. Interestingly, it is an individual’s perceived level of social support that may often be a more reliable indicator of their health status. Compared to other lifestyle factors, we have limited understanding of the mechanisms via which sociality influences morbidity and mortality risk, though reduced activation of the neuroendocrine stress response likely plays a significant role in both humans and animals. Since β-endorphin is known to alleviate the stress response and protect against inflammation and cancer, the activity of an individual’s endogenous μ-opioid system may have important consequences for their health. However, such a direct interaction between social and somatic health is yet to be explored.
In summary, there is substantial evidence that μ-opioid neurotransmission influences sensitivity not only to our physical environment but also our social one. This study adds to previous research implicating the μ-opioid system as a key neural substrate upon which human sociality has evolved.
by Katerina V.-A. Johnson and Robin I. M. Dunbar, Nature | Read more:
Understanding the biological causes of variation in social network size is of particular interest given the robust association between an individual’s social support and their health, ranging from functioning of their immune, endocrine and cardiovascular systems to myelin integrity. Interestingly, it is an individual’s perceived level of social support that may often be a more reliable indicator of their health status. Compared to other lifestyle factors, we have limited understanding of the mechanisms via which sociality influences morbidity and mortality risk, though reduced activation of the neuroendocrine stress response likely plays a significant role in both humans and animals. Since β-endorphin is known to alleviate the stress response and protect against inflammation and cancer, the activity of an individual’s endogenous μ-opioid system may have important consequences for their health. However, such a direct interaction between social and somatic health is yet to be explored.
In summary, there is substantial evidence that μ-opioid neurotransmission influences sensitivity not only to our physical environment but also our social one. This study adds to previous research implicating the μ-opioid system as a key neural substrate upon which human sociality has evolved.
by Katerina V.-A. Johnson and Robin I. M. Dunbar, Nature | Read more:
[ed. Wow, μ-opioid receptor densities among individuals can vary up to 30-50 percent, further discrediting the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression. More to the point (of this study), now I know why I quit Facebook - low tolerance to pain.]
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